Maybe I'm being taken in by an April Fools' joke, but I'll go ahead and play the straight man …

Wikipedia is irresponsible journalism and irresponsible scholarship

It begins with Wikipedia "editors" giving false names. It continues with influence peddling, organized plagiarism, and the stubborn persistence of false information. It ends with Wikipedia "administrators" bearing false witness against those who criticize it.

People who enter the Wikipedia compound and persist in asking the kinds of questions that responsible journalists and responsible scholars are just bound to ask — they will find that their days in good favor are numbered, unless, of course they stop asking those questions and just "assume good faith".

If professional journalists and scholars don't start doing their jobs, and this means doing a whole lot more than duping Wikipediot articles of faith and recycling Wikipediot PR, then Wiki-Pundits will soon be putting them out of those jobs.

So watch out for that …

Jon Awbrey, at 9:25 am EDT on April 1, 2008

Be Careful What You Wiki For

The notes of optimism about Wikipedia that I read above are typical of newbie-weds in their honeymoon period, but I do encourage experimental educators everywhere to gather their rosebuds and thorns of experience where they may.

But a cautionary note is due here. Experiment — and do as you will with your own reputation, but check with your Human Subjects Committee before you send your students out into a Wikipedia field experience under their own names. Some of you, I'm guessing, may still live in a world where accountability is not a banned concept.

Jon Awbrey, at 10:55 am EDT on April 1, 2008

This is a great idea. It’s also worth mentioning that the anonymous editors of Wikipedia pages tend to be overjoyed when an actual expert shows up, so one’s efforts are likely to be rewarded with gratitude along with everything else.

Robin J. Sowards, Asst. Prof. of English at Hobart & Wm. Smith Colleges, at 9:25 am EDT on April 1, 2008

Source For The Goose, Source For The Gander

Since all right-and-left-thinking people agree on the use of multiple sources, and since I cannot possibly encapsulate the years of experience that many diverse thinkers known to me have had with Wikipedia, I will simply pass on a link to The Wikipedia Review, where the comparing and contrasting of experiences with Wikipedia is the daily biz, and where all of these assertions and counter-assertions can be examined in excruciating detail.

Jon Awbrey, at 3:20 pm EDT on April 1, 2008

Content, Conduct, Culture

I have said roughly the same things many times before, but in view of the intervening comments on this topic I think they may bear repeating.

What are the effects of the Wikipedia environment on the critical thinking, information literacy, and research skills of its participants?

Too much commentary on what students learn from Wikipedia stops with the content of articles and fails to examine what students learn from participating in the culture of Wikipedia.

Educators know that education is as much about process as it is about product. They understand that students “learn by doing”, by taking part in communities of practice.

What do students learn by playing the Wikipedia online game? Answers to that question can be gleaned from those who have participated in the full range of Wikipedia activities and seen how it really operates beneath the surface. Those who wish to learn more, while escaping the troubles of personal participation, may sample the narratives and the earnest efforts at critical reflection that one finds at The Wikipedia Review:

http://wikipediareview.com

The effects of using Wikipedia as a source of information is a research question.

The effects of participating more broadly in Wikipedian activities, from the editing game to the policy-making game, is another research question.

Even a bad source of information and a bad guide to the norms of research methodology can serve an educational purpose — if the user is capable of reflecting on its deficiencies.

Whether Wikipedia helps or hinders the user in gaining that capacity is yet another research question.

Educators are aware that learners have many different paths to knowledge. Among the most obvious are these:

1. Learning by being told.
2. Learning by doing things for oneself.
3. Learning by watching what others do.

What do people learn from participating in the full range of activities provided by the Wikipedia website, considered with regard to each of these modes?

Some of the questions that educational researchers would naturally think to ask about the Wikipedia experience are these:

a. What do people learn about the ethical norms of journalism, research, and scholarship?

b. What do people learn about the intellectual norms of journalism, research, and scholarship?

For example, here are a couple of research questions that one might think to ask:

1-b. What do students learn about the relative values of primary and secondary sources from reading the relevant policy pages in Wikipedia?

3-a. What do students learn about plagiarism from watching what others do in Wikipedia?

The habits, good or ill, that students acquire from participation in the culture of Wikipedia are likely to be far more life-altering than the bits of information, good or bad, that they pick up from perusing its pages.

Jon Awbrey, at 9:30 pm EDT on April 1, 2008

Did you see that sentence by the instructor at Spokane Falls Community College?

I’ve students post work there are part of their projects.

Is that English as a second language, do you think, or is Bradley Bleck a native-born speaker?

Greg

Wow, Jon -- it's like these articles from newbie-weds just keep rolling off the conveyor belt lately, about once every fortnight. Amazing.

As do the ordinary kind of newbie-weds, don't you know. Despite all of us rolling our eyes cynically saying that marriage is a lot like a bathtub, inasmuch as it's not so hot after you've been in it awhile. But everybody deserves the chance to be young and clueless for themselves, at least once in their lives, do they not?

The notes of optimism about Wikipedia that I read above are typical of newbie-weds in their honeymoon period, but I do encourage experimental educators everywhere to gather their rosebuds and thorns of experience where they may.

On Going Native

People who merely graze the surface of the Internet Culture tend to underestimate the addictive forces that interactive social media exert on malleable minds.

And people who dip in and out of Wikipedia Culture on a casual basis can scarcely know the risks of induced conversion experiences that habitual users face.

You would not send undergraduate anthropology students off on a field study in a religious cult without adequate preparation, if at all, and even then experienced researchers know the dangers of "going native" in such a setting.

Are you really sure that Wikipedia is all that different?

Are you really, really sure?

Jon Awbrey, at 5:15 pm EDT on April 3, 2008

Tim Lacy's Suggestion

Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger, and, I'm told, Ben Kovitz, had a great notion of taking the increasingly moribund Nupedia project and making it go viral in the medium of the prior artifice supplied by the wiki software paradigm.

So far, so good. Well, perhaps the word "viral" — that some people think is a good thing — should have been a clue, but I guess mere mortals see only so far.

Larry Sanger deserves credit for seeing that the resultant system was going off course from what he took to be its intended mission, and he deserves credit for trying various ways to fix it. Others have chosen to deny the very possibility of error, much less understanding the uses of feedback. I encourage people to keep tracking the diffs between the objectives and the actualities and to keep exploring the space of possible designs.

The sort of dialogue that educators and the public should be having about these issues cannot be reduced to a point-counterpoint debate, however. The questions are complex and require extended discussion. There have been many dead-ends and there will be many back-tracks before we can see our way clear through the current morass.

In my experience, Wikipedia and Citizendium are too much alike in lacking strong traditions of internal criticism, indeed, the hostility of their "true believers" to critical reflection on their tenets of faith. And so we must look elsewhere to find truly open dialogues on all of the most compelling and fundamental issues.

That is one of the missions of The Wikipedia Review, and so I will close here by inviting further discussion there.

Jon Awbrey, at 11:40 am EDT on April 6, 2008