An empirical examination of Wikipedia’s credibility
The November issue of First Monday contains an article from Thomas Chesney that describes a comparative evaluation of Wikipedia pages by experts and non-experts. A group of researcers were asked to evaluate pages from Wikipedia in their subject area or outside of their subject area. Chesney found that subject experts rated Wikipedia pages more highly than non-experts.
The article contains relatively little discussion about why this difference might occur, but there are clearly some interesting things going on here.
January 31st, 2007 at 4:20 am
I’m posting this for Brad Jones from Australia, since WordPress was eating posts for a while (this is fixed now!)
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Interesting article. Yes there are credibility issues (yesterday I was looking at an article on McCarthyism, & whilst being very valuable I was surprised to find that under ‘McCarthy in popular culture’ there was no mention of Miller’s ‘the Crucible’).
But perhaps, from a credibility perspective, we are looking at Wikipedia through McCluhan’s ‘rear view mirror’. While it is & claims to be encyclopaedic, it may be best looked at as a living recorded sociological battle of minds & issues that grasp the contibutors.
There is another interesting article:
On “Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism” By Jaron Lanier
http://www.edge.org/discourse/digital_maoism.html
This (edited)perspective in reponse by CORY DOCTOROW I found particularly illuminating…
“Wikipedia isn’t great because it’s like the Britannica. The Britannica is great at being authoritative, edited, expensive, and monolithic. Wikipedia is great at being free, brawling, universal, and instantaneous.”
“No, if you want to really navigate the truth via Wikipedia, you have to dig into those “history” and “discuss” pages hanging off of every entry. That’s where the real action is, the tidily organized palimpsest of the flamewar that lurks beneath any definition of “truth.”"
“The Britannica tells you what dead white men agreed upon, Wikipedia tells you what live Internet users are fighting over.” (I must use this quote!)
“The Britannica truth is an illusion, anyway. There’s more than one approach to any issue, and being able to see multiple versions of them, organized with argument and counter-argument, will do a better job of equipping you to figure out which truth suits you best.”
“True, reading Wikipedia is a media literacy exercise. You need to acquire new skill-sets to parse out the palimpsest. That’s what makes is genuinely novel. Reading Wikipedia like Britannica stinks. Reading Wikipedia like Wikipedia is mind-opening.”
“So Wikipedia gets it wrong. Britannica gets it wrong, too. The important thing about systems isn’t how they work, it’s how they fail. Fixing a Wikipedia article is simple. Participating in the brawl takes more effort, but then, that’s the price you pay for truth, and it’s still cheaper than starting up your own Britannica.”
So lets look at it from both perspectives - credibility is about participating in the brawl!
Brad