You’ve probably heard how Jimmy Wales is talking up Wikipedia, the encyclopaedia where any— no, we’ve done that joke already.
Wikipedia has introduced a system of peer review, as if this solves anything. The problem is with the word ‘peer’. If articles were guaranteed to be edited by people who know what they’re talking about, then it would be fine. But you have no such guarantee, and in esoteric subjects (much of science, for example cough) you can not be sure that another student (a ‘peer’), for example, is not deliberately falsifying entries to steal a march on the competition. Paranoid, moi?
You betcha.
As my friend Mark puts it :
I am not in favour of citing Wikipedia as an “authority”, if by this we mean using it as a means of establishing points without any further discussion. I encourage my students, who are preparing for examinations at the moment, to engage critically with a range of secondary sources, one of which may indeed sometimes be Wikipedia.
And of course, with access to a University library, there is no excuse for not critically reviewing the primary literature, and doing your own fact-checking.
(if you do use Wikipedia, and you are checking articles therein, and you find a mistake; please do correct it. Just because I’m suspicious of the enterprise does not mean I want it to be wrong!)
(x-posted from the ‘Rats)
I think anyone who uses Wikipedia or indeed any web-2.0-style cooperative venture as a primary source of verified and verifiable information deserves all they get. As Tom Lehrer said, the reason that folk songs are so bad is that they were written by ‘The People’. Snobbish, moi? Certainly.
You people say like if you should be only skeptical about Wikipedia and not of other sources. That’s absurd. There is no proper time to be paranoid or to have a rigorous scientific posture, it’s a 24/7 activity.
As for the “peer” problem, who said there aren’t unscrupulous people who are above “The People”? In fact, these are more likely to have interest in spreading falsities, and not people from “The People”. It’s easy to see that someone with a lesser knowledge, as you are implying, would not be able to think of a lie to put in there with second intentions. They would instead write nonsense, or things like you find in the Uncyclopedia, and that are easily spotted by any non-naïve reader.
I’m writing this comment with a second intention: to advertise my own blog post on the subject !… Sorry about that 🙂 (at least I’m saying it explicitly, I hope no student quote me in their school assignments, thinking I’m a reliable source, and get a bad degree. No wait.. Yes, I do hope!…)