Do You Trust Wikipedia?
Wikipedia has come under fire recently for letting plagiarism go unchecked, and unwittingly allowing hackers to use the online encyclopedia to spread malware.
As many have pointed out, this is inevitable due to the nature of Wikipedia - it allows anyone to create and edit entries on whatever topic they like, without prior moderation by Wikipedia administrators - a disconnected group of volunteers, selected mainly due to past contributions.
On the plus side, this often results in far more comprehensive stories, since millions of people could potentially contribute to a single entry, each adding information relevant to their own areas of expertise.
On the other hand, the free-for-all nature of the service means that it often relies on users to report plagiarism or inaccurate information. For topics that aren’t frequently accessed, inaccuracies could potentially remain on the site for months before they’re discovered.
So, do you trust Wikipedia as a primary source of information? Does the possibility of increased depth fully account for the risk that there may be some inaccuracies?
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November 8th, 2006 at 3:39 pm
Wikipedia is so very convenient for me. I refer to that site a lot daily. So, I do trust Wikipedia, and I am cautious of the content inside. In my experience, I have found Wikipedia to be very resourceful for me personally as well as professionally as a blog author for BTI.
What amazes me is how well the site is moderated already… I can only imagine how difficult it is to micro-manage every page, article, reference, etc… on that site. I think that they do the best that they can to assure the content is of great quality. Perhaps, I should spend more time there and help contribute. I turn to Wikipedia very often… in many cases I use that site to find information more than I would use Google.
So, yes… I am concerned, because I want Wikipedia to maintain a great reputation and continue to harbor quality information and see that spam, junk, etc… is limited as best as it can.
What do you see in the future for Wikipedia? Can people like me really help towards their cause?
November 8th, 2006 at 4:26 pm
I have never trusted collaborative media sources, including Wikipedia, DMOZ and JoeAnt. They are slanted, biased, and unbalanced. When I do use them (I reference Wikipedia a lot), I use what I can back up with other sources.
Now don’t get me wrong - the folks who envisioned these things are not bad - they just wanted something bigger than they could provide on their own. If they could check everything and assure the quality of the data provided on their sites, they wouldn’t need volunteers.
MySpace suffers something similar - I read that for MySpace editors to view everything, they’d have to check something like 2,000+ entries every minute of every day. Google has set itself up for a possibly destructive outcome with YouTube, because they don’t possess the manpower to check every entry.
I will stand back and use collaborative efforts as needed, but I would NEVER become part of them, I would NEVER work for them (even though I’ve edited for Wikipedia in the past, I’ve given that up as a futile effort), and I would never endorse their results as trustworthy.
Go to Wikipedia and read about, say, Mormons. What are you reading? Was it written by Mormons? Was it written by Catholics? Was it written by Satanists? Was it written by God-fearing, bible-following Christians? YOU DON’T KNOW IF YOU DON’T ALREADY KNOW ALL SIDES OF THE SUBJECT! A Mormon will tell you one thing, a Satanist will tell you another. The God-fearing, bible-following Christian will try to give you the scriptural facts and the Catholics will try to rationalize it all. In the end, did you learn anything? Of course not.
As Fox News likes to say, “We Report, You Decide.” The problem is that the majority of people decide without knowing all of the facts. It shows in the reporting on Mormons, it showed in the mainstream media reporting on yesterday’s elections & the trash leading up to 11/08, it shows in the way many people view global warming. People read, they believe and they spread lies because it is too inconvenient to take the time and effort to determine the truth.
Do I trust Wikipedia? Not on your life. At least, not on anything worth anything.
November 8th, 2006 at 4:32 pm
Is there an alternative source other than Wikipedia that you trust? I totally understand your points here and they are exceptionally valid! I use Wikipedia for pretty basic things, such as they history of Nintendo, and things like that…
So, other than an old school traditional encyclopedia, assuming that you trust that, what are other online sources of information that you can trust the authenticity of the content?
November 8th, 2006 at 4:35 pm
Never trust man-made writings absolutely - but you can get some better accuracy from places like Britannica.com or MS Encarta.
November 8th, 2006 at 4:53 pm
How did Wikipedia become so popular? Or is their popularity inflated? Do people believe that Wikipedia is more popular than Britannica.com and MS Encarta when in reality it’s not?
Without doing any research, I would believe that Wikipedia is more popular than the two sources you mentioned… one of which is Microsoft. Is that false?
If it is actually true, then how did that come to be this way?
Is it because people are giving the opportunity to contribute? Which gives them a feeling of personal accomplishment?
November 8th, 2006 at 7:42 pm
Wikipedia is really useful for school going kids, it had so much information to help us do our projects, but I’m really shocked to some bad elements take it to the wrong side
November 8th, 2006 at 8:26 pm
Wikipedia is free and has a lot of exposure with the Open Source crowd - not the smartest or most discerning group on the planet.
Encarta is also free, but is associated with Microsoft. Better than the Web version is the purchased client app available for years, with free instant updates.
Britannica is free, as well - but it has the stigma of being an establishment publication.
Thilak, it isn’t so much the bad elements - it is more the folks who want to contribute so badly, they’ll do anything to feel needed. It is also those who want to get their viewpoints seen in a ‘respectable’ environment. These people will never be published by Britannica or Encarta, so they get into Wikipedia.
Remember - to someone unaware, I could make a Yugo seem like a great buy. In fact, Malcolm Bricklin did just that in the eighties - he convinced thousands to fork over $3995 for a new Yugo. Then, many of those same people jumped into Hyundai Excels. Fooled twice…
November 9th, 2006 at 1:39 am
Well, I totally missed the obvious earlier… Look at how Wikipedia is indexed in Google. Off hand, it seems that very often when I am searching on Google, a Wikipedia page pulls up very high in the results. I can’t think of the last time I noticed an Encarta page pull up in a Google search results page.
I would guess it would be natural for Google to promote Wikipedia over Encarta, because Microsoft is their competition in many ways, and Wikipedia is simply, Wikipedia.
On that note though… I am curious to see if Google ever launches their own encyclopedia… for all I know, they probably already have. LOL
November 9th, 2006 at 2:08 am
They definitely are working in that direction…
http://scholar.google.com/
November 9th, 2006 at 2:20 pm
I trust wikipedia. But I wouldn’t use wikipedia for a whole college essay. And in reply to Vexation, Wikipedia has an active group of editors that tracks every change that goes on. They have the power to reverse changes in less than 15 minutes. And they lock topics that get alot of nonesense spam and incorrect facts.
Trust wikipedia, but don’t trust 100% of the articles. And use common sense, if it doesn’t look true it probably isn’t.
November 10th, 2006 at 8:19 pm
One might be able to trust the intentions of the Wikipedia ideology, but if you cannot trust the information, then it matters not what they say or mean to do.
You either assure your reputation or you don’t. It matters not what you say you want to do.
November 10th, 2006 at 10:09 pm
I was someone reflecting on that as well. I think I mentioned something about it eariler. But that does impress me. I think they do a great job keeping their site from getting trashed up. I guess the problem Vex is saying, is that Wikipedia might not be the best judge of what’s trash and what’s not…
Eitherway, I have always been pleased with the results on Wikipedia. I really have. When you go there to look something up, the amount of information you get back in return is amazing! I am not sorry to say, that I enjoy using Wikipedia, and I trust the information. I don’t search for much, just simple things.
Vex, give an example of where you are coming from? Link up a page or two from Wikipedia that you can use as a brief reference. I am not doubting you at all, I just want to see some of these pages that are totally hosed up.
November 11th, 2006 at 12:37 am
[...] The German version on the popular Wikipedia provided a direct download link to a version of the Blaster virus. The download link was supposed to be a fix for the Blaster virus. Instead of the file being a fix, it was the actual virus. When users clicked on the link and installed the associated program, it actually infected their computers with the virus. All this happens just days after Vex published this article. I am starting to see that Wikipedia might be a dangerous place. [...]
November 11th, 2006 at 1:18 am
It isn’t that Wikipedia is a dangerous place - it is part of the Internet. As such, it is just like the real world. Some parts are good, others are bad and still others are very dangerous.
One of the reasons we see Wikipedia info being pretty good is the basic core of folks out there are good - the biggest problem lies in when you have Intel people writing about Intel & AMD, while AMD people are writing about AMD & Intel - and neither are identified as who they are and where they are coming from. In this case, is anyone being objective?
We’ve all seen even the Wikipedia pages where the flags are up, warning readers that the info may be incomplete or that there may be bias. I wrote an essay once about the Catholic church that horribly infuriated a number of Catholic friends - they accused me of being biased against the Catholic faith and told me I didn’t know what I was talking about. When I showed them the points they had problems with came right out of official Catholic sources, they got even madder at me and checked with various priests - they were mostly told to avoid me. In this case, even the Catholics felt that the information I pulled out of Catholic records was slanted because I was using it. So, what would have happened if I took that essay and put it up on Wikipedia? Chances are, assorted Catholics would’ve complained it was biased information and my writings would have been flagged as slanted. The end all was the source I got the information from… a Catholic bishop, who happens to be related to me. Regardless, Wikipedia would have flagged it and no one would have taken what I wrote seriously BECAUSE WIKIPEDIA MARKED IT AS BIASED.
The essay was written as part of an interfaith educational effort, intended to give various faiths information about each other - each of us wrote on our own faith and then had to write about another faith of our choosing after interviewing an expert member of that faith and that member had to approve the writing. So, was it biased? According to the expert on Catholicism (the bishop), it wasn’t biased. According to the laypeople, is was. So, it is often held on Wikipedia that the truth may very well be labeled as slanted.
Wikipedia and other collaborative efforts are often more about being politically correct than they are about accuracy. I won’t say Wikipedia is a bad place to get info - rather, as I mentioned before, you must verify what you read before you run with it.
And do not ever download anything where you cannot verify the source.