Wikipedia: A Reliable Source?
By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
I have been hearing for years that it is unwise to use the website Wikipedia.com for my research because, people say, “anyone can put anything in there.” Which is largely true.
Wikipedia — a combination of “wiki,” the Hawaiian word for quick, and encyclopedia — is a collection of nearly 5 million articles in its English version, written and edited by people who feel they have expertise to offer on a particular subject. This means that when you look up a topic on Wikipedia you are reading articles by anonymous individuals, who may or may not know what they are talking about.
The people who run the website state that they “strive for articles that document and explain the major points of view, giving due weight with respect to their prominence in an impartial tone” and that “all articles must strive for verifiable accuracy, citing reliable, authoritative sources, especially when the topic is controversial or is on living persons.” But they can’t remain on top of all 5 million articles.
Anyone reading an article on Wikipedia can click on the “edit” button at the top of the page and add corrections or observations about the content. The hope is that readers of Wikipedia will call attention to anything erroneous that has been posted. It is hard to tell whether that happens in a reliable manner.
That said, I have found Wikipedia a valuable research tool. I would not trust it as the final arbiter on a controversial topic, such as Obamacare or papal infallibility. The last editing of the article may have been by an angry partisan or mischievous tenth-grade student from Beverly Hills. But the site can provide quick access to basic information.
Who was the king of Spain during the War of the Spanish Succession? Who represented France at the Treaty of Versailles? Who was Theodore Roosevelt’s first vice-president? You no longer have to leave your desk to get a book on the topic. The answers pop up on your computer screen. The website is now so popular that the odds are that if you do an Internet search on a topic, Wikipedia will be the first source that will appear.
Which can be a problem. J.M., a reader from Arizona, writes to give warning to parents whose children rely upon Wikipedia in doing research for their assignments, which students are far more likely to do these days than go to a standard encyclopedia or other research source.
J.M. writes, “People who have their children do research on the Internet need to be aware of the subtle but dangerous propagandizing that occurs in the search engines. Pick a subject, virtually any subject, and you’ll find Wikipedia on the first page of search results. One might assume this to be a natural result of a search process, but when there are a few hundred thousand other entries, it would appear amazing that the popular encyclopedia should be first in line, as if omniscient in all matters.”
J.M. agrees that Wikipedia has its uses: “I’m not implying that the Wikipedia entry will have bad data. It is usually quite good. But the follow-up research sources that Wikipedia recommends will be the easily accessible references that generally preach the party line and away from research contradicting the present fad in the academic world. Global warming is a prime exanple. An inquisitive student might do a Google search on a topic such as ‘satellite measurement of surface temperature of the earth.’ Sure enough, Wikipedia shows up on the first page of the search results with references to ‘global warming’ in the ensuing article.
“However, there will also be references to 28,100,000 (!) other articles, not found in Wikipedia, some of which will challenge the idea of global warming.”
The problem, J.M. continues, is that there “are not many students who are going to wade through more than the first dozen or so references. They will go with the Wikipedia reference.” Thus Wikipedia becomes the default source on the topic.
J.M. points out the implications: “At this point we get to see the implementation of George Orwell’s famous ‘memory hole,’ in which an article or reference is assigned a location number 1,000 in the search table. I’m not aware of any studies that document how deeply people will penetrate into the stack of pages of material presented by an Internet search engine, but I suspect it is not more than a few pages. Everything past that could be defined as the ‘memory hole.’ As an aside, I did a search on George Orwell and, surprise, Wikipedia is the first reference!
“A man’s bookcase used to be a good indicator of his interests, but nowadays your Google or Yahoo search history doesn’t really tell much at all since the filter is established not by the individual reader doing research but by the folks who build the search engine parameters. They determine the consensus views on the major issues of our time. Who are they? What are their biases? Who knows? I can’t help but think that it would be wise for Catholic scholars to create a search engine, perhaps one named ‘Aquinas,’ to provide some balance.
“I decided on a lark,” J.M. continues, “to do a random search for various and sundry strange items. I did a search for ‘Lithuanian fish tacos.’ I got 2,030,000 references; Wikipedia was the first result. I searched for ‘Sumerian haircut technology’ and got 11,600,000 references, and yes, Wikipedia was again on the first page!”
On another topic: the rise of atheism. I have taken comfort over the past decade or so by telling myself that the influence of atheists such as Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and the television talk-show host Bill Maher is not all that widespread; that they cater to a small audience of activists. It looks as if I was whistling past the graveyard.
An article in The Washington Post on September 9 by Sarah Pulliam Bailey informs us of a poll taken by the student newspaper the Harvard Crimson, indicating that Harvard’s combined number of atheists and agnostics among its incoming class exceeds the number of Catholics and Protestants. Writes Bailey, “The Crimson’s poll suggests a decline in number of Protestants and Catholics and a rise of atheists and agnostics in the three years of available data. For the class of 2017, the number of Protestants and Catholics was 42.4 percent, compared to 37 percent for the class of 2018 and 34.1 percent for the class of 2019.
“For atheists and agnostics, the trend is reversed. For the class of 2017, atheists and agnostics made up 32.4 percent of the campus, while they made up 35.6 percent of the class of 2018 and 37.9 percent of the class of 2019. Class make-ups of other religious traditions appeared to remain mostly the same. Ten percent of the respondents said they were Jewish and 2.5 percent said they were Muslim.”
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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford CT 06492.
