March 11, 2008
Media Scholar Sounds Alarm About Wikipedia
The guardians of Wikipedia are locked in a battle over whether the online encyclopedia should be more selective in the articles it contains, according to a story last week in The Economist. The fight reportedly pits the “inclusionsists” against the “deletionists.” Andrew Lih, a Wikipedia administrator who helped start Columbia University’s new-media program, worries that the encyclopedia is in danger of becoming elitist, according to the article. Mr. Lih is identified as a deletionist turned inclusionist. He encouraged his former students to contribute to the site and is currently writing a book about Wikipedia.—-Andrea L. Foster
Posted on Tuesday March 11, 2008 | Permalink |Comments
Commenting is closed for this article.
Previous: Happy 'Rewire Your Life Day'
Next: Vandalism on Wikipedia Is Good, Says the Novelist Nicholson Baker
Educators need to be more concerned with the forms of conduct that students learn from participating in Wikipediot “culture”, and less with Wikipedia’s ephemeral content.
If they do that, they will realize that Wikipedia is one of the most elitist cultures that one can imagine — its privileged classes don’t just delete articles, they delete entire points of view from fair representation.
— Jon Awbrey Mar 11, 01:54 PM #
I love Wikipedia. I encourage my students to use it as well. However, I have noticed that some articles get so many contributions that the articles become very disorganized—some to the point of being unusable.
— Robyn Mar 11, 04:51 PM #
Thats hilarious—almost the entire educational system is elitist!
I’ve heard so-called scholars on here talk about “the poor” like they were scum.
Wikipedia is more for and of the people than the old decrepit, stale, paradigm.
Get with it—its the 21st century!
— Max Macias Mar 11, 04:54 PM #
Wikipedia isn’t something I would ever even recommend using in a classroom setting. Too many students don’t verify the information given on the site. If it sounds good, then it must be so, right?
I was part of a project this summer that was blasted to bits by a Wikipedia poster. Sadly, the guy sounded as though he knew what he was talking about, but he didn’t. It caused quite a stink. Ultimately, he was banned from posting on the site and was given the boot from a few local organizations as well.
Just because someone cites a source doesn’t make it so. Always do your homework, and doublecheck your facts!
— Amanda Mar 11, 06:19 PM #
The wisdom of crowds has only been verified to exist on certain types of predictive tasks so we can expect articles in Wiki—X to be great when making such predictions. All other topics, the “banality of crowds”, from well known poor currency driving out better currencies, envy and backbiting effects, and the babel of bigotries, and like principles, appears. My students experimented by adding journal validated (a dozen replications each required of same results) contents to controversial and non-controversial topics—finding that random deletions were made in non-controversial areas while in the controversial ones, in most cases, right wing bigotries prevailed and in a minority, left wing ones prevailed. We did not have a big enough sample to generalize these results to all topics but they suggest an emerging Wikipedia unfallibly accurate for any topic that bores and infallibly bigoted for any topic of interest.
— Richard Tabor Greene Mar 11, 10:55 PM #
“Wikipedia isn’t something I would ever even recommend using in a classroom setting. Too many students don’t verify the information given on the site.” — Amanda
What you say is certainly true. But that’s an important teaching moment about source evaluation and the nature of knowledge. How do you know what you’re finding is accurate and helpful, and how can you verify this through multliple source research?
Students in the 21st Century are going to default to “easy” online sources like Wikipedia — we know this already. So it’s our responsibility as educators to help them navigate the entire realm of sources effectively. And part of that involves teaching them about the processes and politics of knowledge production through research. That’s a skillset they’ll need in all areas of life.
— Jeff Drouin Mar 12, 09:56 AM #
Of course higher education is elitist — it serves the intellectually elite. People who are not geared to intellectual work shouldn’t be expected or encouraged to participate — their strengths are different, and should be encouraged; I wouldn’t want very many of my students to work on my house — they couldn’t handle that work, which is directed to another elite group: tradespeople.
— Ray Mar 12, 11:20 AM #
Wikipedia provides general information and basic definitions. It is a great place to start when one knows nothing about a subject. I’ve never used it to explore controversial issues. I think it is a great tool for learning.
— Andrew Permenter Mar 12, 02:56 PM #
Jeff Drouin, commentor #6 makes an excellent point. Helping students critically analyze Wikipedia citations is the same skill set for evaluating all websites. Doesn’t one have to read with a critical eye even the Chronicle’s site?
— Health Care Ethics Professor Mar 13, 05:45 PM #