Repeat after me: Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia!

An educator’s perspective

Students love Wikipedia. Convenience and deadlines remembered at the last minute conspire with immense success in making undergraduate students avid consumers of web content. Professors fight their pupils’ addiction with stern grading policies bolded, underlined or italicized in the syllabi. Remarks about Wikipedia’s lack of accountability and questionable accuracy pepper office hour conversations. The History Department at Middlebury College went as far as to completely ban Wikipedia as a source for academic papers.

The teacher’s reactions are natural and expected. The instructors fear the worst: indiscriminate use of unverifiable (often questionable) information can forever damage one of the pillars of higher education, namely, critical thinking. They also fear the raise of a new class of intellectual hucksters, who in the name of “democratizing knowledge” will promote intellectual fraud on a massive scale. Just the other day a prominent Wikipedia editor was unmasked as an impostor. Ryan Jordan, 24, a Kentucky paralegal with no college degree presented himself on Wikipedia as a tenured professor of religion at a private university.

Yet, legitimate fears of a Milli Vanilli coup in the peaceful shades of the hallowed grove of Academe can be alloyed in more than one way. A significant step forward (and to a certain extent sideways) would be to tell the world (and our students) what Wikipedia really is. Then, we should devise a method of using that which is good in it, ignoring or banning only that which is bad.

Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia. It is a one of a kind search engine and information directory. It is a quick and dirty, but quite flexible and resilient system of classifying a large amount of web-based information. Seen this way, banning Wikipedia should be as justified or necessary as, let us say, banning Google would be.

Although it presents itself as a collection of neutrally written summaries of the existing human knowledge on any significant topic (the traditional definition of an encyclopedia), Wikipedia is far more and far less than this. It is more because it includes entries no encyclopedia has ever attempted to catalog. Wikipedia maintains an extensive collection of entries dedicated to porn stars. An article discusses in the most pedantic manner the Klingon language (of Star Trek fame). It is less, because even its more traditional entries are many times cut-and-pasted from other more or less legitimate web pages, mixed in with commentaries cleverly masked under what Wikipedia contributors call themselves “weasel words” (“there has been criticisms that”, “clearly”).

Despite its drawbacks, Wikipedia has a huge net advantage. Its hard core cadre of “very active contributors” (under 1000, but responsible for 50% of its edits), are on a constant lookout. They keep harvesting and adding external links pointing to many useful, legitimate and valuable web resources. These links, usually listed at the end of an entry, and not to be confounded with the links that pepper the entries and which point to other Wikipedia articles, connect to a profusion of recognized and respectable web resources. Among them there are many academic journal articles, books, reports, or news reports. These links are, in fact, Wikipedia’s true treasure trove. Even for topics that can be considered trivial, the sources could be solid. The article dedicated to the recently deceased Anna Nicole Smith included, at one point, 88 sources, most of them reputable: AP dispatches, BBC reports and New York Times articles.¹

Wikipedia’s leaders are keenly aware of its innate advantage. Their collaboration with the Wikiseek search engine, which piggybacks Wikipedia’s collection of hyperlinks and which Advertising Age calls “the next Google,” is a sign that Wikipedia’s leadership has a visionary self-understanding of its real strength.

For us, educators, this has the immediate implication that we should tell our students to use Wikipedia in a manner similar to that in which we use any other search engines. When seen as a collection of resources and hyperlinks to other, verifiable and credible information resources, one that is conveniently and timely updated, Wikipedia becomes not a destination, but an intermediate station in our knowledge quest.

However, if dispensed without any further guidance, this piece of advice might bounce right back at us, magnanimous educators, who in our wisdom are happy to call a spade a spade and let it rust in the shed. Here is my own “cookbook recipe” for generating knowledge using Wikipedia which I use in some of my classes at Purdue University.

Start your research process with setting an appointment with your instructor. He and she can point you to certifiable sources (books, articles, reports), many of them that cannot be found online.

Follow up on your conversation with in depth searches on one of the major article databases provided by the university library (ProQuest, AcademicSearch, EbscoHost, etc) or through the library stacks. These are not just very powerful and accessible “search engines,” they are also excellent filters of information. Information can be easily sorted by topics, subjects and time.

Only use Wikipedia to identify sources for clarifying specific concepts or terms.

When you start looking at a Wikipedia page, in addition to reading the content and deciding how relevant is for your needs, always do a quick quality check. Here are some things you should do:

Read the text carefully. Misspelling or poor grammar in Wikipedia entries indicate that the information was added by a sloppy contributor and the value of their work should put in doubt;

1. Check for missing well-known features of a particular story or concept. If the Fascism entry does not mention anti-Semitism (as is the case for the current version of the entry), its value should be doubted;
2. Value statements or citations that aren’t credited are almost always suspicious;
3. When Wikipedia entries justify value or factual statements by making reference to specific sources, the authority of the sources should always be checked using a number of criteria such as: Is the source cited from an institutional webpage or a formal publication of recognized academic, research, education or scholarly institutions, such as universities, academic publishing houses or journal sites? Is the reference complete? Does the source have an author or is it anonymous? All sources are usually linked at the end of the entry.
4. The Wikipedia label “controversial” posted at the top of some articles indicates that the topic has created conflict and debate. Take everything with a large grain of salt;
5. Always check for signs of conflict among contributors even if the article is not labeled “controversial.” These signs can be found under the “history” or “discussion” tabs that come with any Wikipedia entry; and
6. When citing information you found on Wikipedia, always mention the sources the Wikipedia entry relies on. (It goes without saying that the links to the sources should not just be glanced at, they should be clicked and the pages thoroughly examined).

Carefully used Wikipedia can serve a role in our educational system. Of course, it cannot be used as a Star Trek teleporter, to zoom you in a blink from planet Ignorance to the Wisdom quadrant. Yet, Wikipedia can sometimes be a useful hiking pole on our knowledge journeys.