I am a college student [that's UK college, not the american kind, so 17-18 year olds] and in class all the time I see people saying things like, "Oh I'll just look it up on Wikipedia", "Yeah I get all my homework off Wikipedia", etc.

I've tried pointing out that Wikipedia is inherently unreliable and I get met with protests of "Oh, but it's usually reliable!".

What can I say to these people to show them that it really, really isn't? Bear in mind that claims of "Oh well Jimbo Wales is using Wikipedia to fund his reign of terror and there's this really bad admin called SlimVirgin who kills babies" or whatever isn't going to go down well.

Does anyone have some examples of outright lies that have been published in the Wikipedia mainspace for a good length of time? Some scientific articles which make no sense? Things like that. Obvious examples of Wikipedia's uselessness; it's a lot easier to point to specific examples, 'cause you can't argue with them, and you guys know WP history a lot more than I The only controversy I can think of is the Siegenthaler (sp?) one but nobody knows who he is here. And I want to convince my friends that using Wikipedia is a really stupid habit to get into.

Thanks in advance

My sister is a schoolteacher and I showed her the reality of Wikipedia by editing an article right in front of her eyes (for WP idiots out there, I did not vandalize the article).

Since she was an English literature teacher who taught Orwell's 1984 as a set text, she knew then what the real problem was.

So my answer would be, get your friends to edit some articles. Then ask them whether they trust an encyclopedia which was written by themselves.

Better still, insert some lies into articles that they are bound to use in their next assignment, and then watch the fun when they copy the "facts" verbatim and get low marks.

Ask them this: would they want a electrician who's learned all about "reliable" wiring from Wikipedia fixing their home?

Plumbing?
HVAC?
Computers?
Medicine?

Then ask them why they wouldn't.

It's why Wikipedia is nothing more than fast food knowledge, and with enough empty calories and transfat to shorten a life, literally, if it replaces a healthy sit down dinner full of comprehensive education.

Wikipedia is no substitute to real study; real experience; and real knowledge of a subject.

I think one of the really meaningful ways to discredit Wikipedia's use for academic subjects is to simply compare the length and number of references for an important academic subject (such as Napoleon III with 4 references, versus Mothra with 16; or try molality with 4 short paragraphs and no references, versus web comics with at least 30 paragraphs and 42 references).

Would school children be advised to consult the Mork & Mindy show for a report on interstellar spacetravel? Would they be advised to consult the kids at their neighborhood skateboard park about the formula for momentum?

Such is why they shouldn't consult Wikipedia. Unless their assignment deals with science fiction creatures or Internet humor -- then Wikipedia is truly awesome.

Greg

The difference, of course, is that you're talking about "reliability" while Joe Sixpack cares about "accuracy". Although Wikipedia is very unreliable, its also very accurate, which is why its so popular. If you want to turn people against it, you'll need to show them a problem they actually care about.

I'm sure the accuracy comment will get me slammed, pretty much by people who fail to recognise that books, scholarly journals, encyclopedias, newspapers and the like are riddled with lies, misrepresentations, misinformation and errors of omission. Feel free to have at it.

This is what I told a cousin of mine (she just entered college) about Wikipedia.

"If you're using it for anything but a starting point on your research, you're going to lose points on the paper, and you deserve it for being lazy. A lot of the time Wikipedia will point you at good places (sources and external links), to go deeper into whatever your paper is about.. but don't blindly accept what it tells you. Use your brain, it's what got you in college."

I'm guessing that you got your definitions of accuracy and reliability off Wikipedia.

It shows.

Jonny

Like with Occam's Razor the public seeks a simple explanation to a question or subject. They see Wikipedia as accurate, because to check for accuracy would mean they'll have to be the researchers (and few have the time or even want to dig through reams of text to fact check), and being lazy, the reference links at the bottom of each article is suppose to make OTHERS do their homework for them.

As a business, Jimbo and his "Foundation" can't claim Wikipedia isn't a source, because it'll make Wikipedia as nothing but a tabloid. So they try their best to speak from both sides of the mouth, with the folks hurt most by it, is the population they claim to most serve.

Fast food knowledge with the pitfalls.

I agree 100%. Very few people care about the misconduct. It's the quality of the content that needs to be called into question, clearly and repeatedly.

This just started, thanks to your inspiration: Obvious examples of Wikipedia's uselessness.

Again, I second that. Creating a catalogue of the Obvious examples of Wikipedia's uselessness is a good move. When this expands we should all compare notes.

I mean, actually check the accuracy of articles you know something about and you'll find they're generally accurate. In my own field, I'd say they're better than newspapers but worse than textbooks - which is probably the same as any encyclopedia you'd get at a grochery store. Merely harping about how they're unreliable isn't very productive, especially when any idiot with a 300 baud modem can look for himself and see that they're generally right. You can ignore this if you like, but if your goal is to convince people to be skeptical about what they read in Wikipedia, you'll need to talk about something they care about.

Hey thanks man. Just poking around five minutes I found the fun fact, "There are only six known cases of a person surviving untreated rabies." in Wikipedia's Rabies article. It's made the list.

Generally accurate with a * that can mess up the understanding of a subject.

For example, psuedosciences being interjected into hard science topics (usually "innocently" listed as "Alternative"). When the topic is best described by what it is, not what it can be twice removed down the evolutionary line.



It is productive to criticize Wikipedia's version when a person is looking for a quality article (that you know is written by some expert) and resources that reflect it.

Just goto the eMedicine site. Check the experts who post articles about conditions there. Everyone is qualified to post those topics, as each is a MD and treats patients in that field of expertise.

Which site is more trustworthy for such information?
Which site has the expertise to write about such information?
Which site has the credibility?

Would the same quality assurance apply with medical (or other hard science) topics on Wikipedia?

No.

Which is why Medline and PubMed is a better resource (let alone a medical school library).

Sounds fair enough, but it's not the whole story. What about the articles where there are rubbish references and where good references are debarred because of someone's POV?

Err, yes. I wouldn't cite wikipedia for anything (although I love it when students do, it makes it so easy to catch plagarism but we live in a world where people read and believe newspapers ....

Of course, eMedicine probably has terrible errors in a couple places too. Less than Wikipedia, but if you trust it more, what's the final impact? It's certainly true that people should not blindly trust Wikipedia for things that are important (although I'll admit I ususally trust it if it's just for idle chit-chat that goes nowhere - usually because the increase in accuracy from other sources is not worth the increase in effort to find them then) - understanding the actual level of reliability and accuracy and trying to communicate that to the public is a worthy goal. What the actual level of reliability and accuracy are harder to say. Most things you read in Wikipedia have the virtue of being right, which makes reliability discussions somewhat more academic. I'd never use Wikipedia as a reference for a scholarly paper, right (unless it was on Wikipedia), but if I'm having an idle chit-chat about the religious affiliations of the governors of Jamaica in the 1800s, it may not be worth a trip to the library.

Kamryn,

The second half of my "Junior" year in High School (age 17) I left my "civilian" high school and enrolled in a military school in another State. It was my first real encounter with just how phreaking insane other human beings of all ages can be — and I thought that I knew a lot about that before, but I knew nothing, n-o-o-o-thing.

And yet the experience had me so brainwashed that it took me the entire rest of the summer, back home with my subsequently-seeming normal friends and family, to realize that I would have to be totally phreaking nuts to go back.

To this day I simply cannot convey to people who have not been through a similar experience what it was like to find oneself in a psycho-social culture bubble, cut off from interaction with any sane human being.

The biggest threat that Wikipedia poses to developing souls is not the content of its pages — it is the warped way of looking at the world that they inculcate there. That is the scariest thing of all.

Jon Awbrey

I think we have an honest difference of opinion here, i.e. conduct vs. content.

CONDUCT: To me, the souls lost to Wikipedia are not a very big concern. I mean, if it keeps them in their basements rather than out in the world, what's the problem?

CONTENT: This affects people who aren't actually working on the project, which includes the other 99.999% of the world population.

Do people really need to care why the content is so rotten? I'll spare you a poll.

Another name for this dimension — weedy deedy weedy deedy — is Process vs. Product.

Now, I'm not the sort of reductionist who says you can have Horse without Carriage, so let's not get distracted with that.

My entire education over the past many decades has taken place in a period of continuing educational reform and revolution.

When I was in the 1st grade there was the Phonics Revolution — my 1st grade teacher was doing her Master's on it and I got placed in the Experimental Group who got larned to read and spell the NewΦ∠∂ Φonics way, while the other half of the class got larned stuff the tried-&-true Rote Memory way. Now you know who to blame.

I was born early enough that I almost escaped the Draft of the New Math Revolution, but being the eldest of a large gang of siblings I had to learn everything 4 or 5 times all over again in my duty as chief book and homework helper.

In high school and college I met with major curriculum reform movements in every field that I studied — it was customary to attribute this era of feverish refurbishment to Sputnik and the Space Race and the idea that it was okay to learn Russian in addition to Latin — in the sciences there came a host of new program(me)s whose names I forget but whose acronyms I remember, BSSC in Biology, CHEM Studies in Chemistry, the Berkeley Series and PSSC in Physics.

Even much later, when I was working as a statistical adjunct in various health science education and research settings, along came a thing called The GPEP Report that called for a major paradigm shift in the way that Physicians and other Health Science professionals were trained.

And it's been that way ever since …

What was the Battle Cry of all these Revolutions?

You know it …

No More Rote — Riff This Time !!!

In other words, all of these curriculum review bodies came to the same sorts of conclusions about the shortcomings of The Way We Always Did It (TWWADI). To wit, or not, the educational paradigm whereby the student simply absorbs large bodies of static facts as if they would always remain static is a model that no longer cuts it when it comes to the general education that every citizen needs to function in contemporary society, nor does it form an adequate model for specialized disciplines and technical training.

Of course one has to learn large masses of factual material, but that is not enough. One has to learn the process by which that knowledge was produced in the first place, because it is only that method of inquiry that perseveres over the long haul.

Jon Awbrey

Fair enough. Thanks for your response.