Jimbo on Wikipedia reliability
February 23rd, 2007 | by Tim Wilson |Jimmy Wales joined Leo Laporte and Amber MacArthur on net@nite recently. It was a pretty standard conversation about Wikipedia that wouldn’t surprise anyone who frequents the site. There were a couple quotes worth noting, however. I’ll keep these handy when I do presentations that mention Wikipedia and the inevitable question about reliability gets asked.
Amber asked how Jimmy would respond to people who say that Wikipedia can’t be trusted (at 31:41 of the recording). He replied:
People do need to approach Wikipedia with some understanding of where it comes from and how to use it. Certainly if you’re a regular user of Wikipedia and you’ve tested it against your other knowledge and against other sources, most people will report it’s actually really pretty good overall. At the same time because it is live editing and anything can be changed at any time you have to be a little cautious. If you read something a little crazy or suspicious you should always check it out. And there are a lot of techniques as an advanced user. You can look in the history. You can look at the discussion page to see if some point has been debated. Check the references at the bottom. You can always tag something. If it sounds suspicious to you, tag it with a tag that says this fact needs a cite or something.
One of Leo’s interns who happens to be a sophomore in high school asked how Jimmy would recommend convincing schools to accept Wikipedia as a trusted source (at 53:02 of the recording). Jimmy’s advice:
Be careful how you use Wikipedia. It really isn’t a trusted source. It really is edited real-time and it could be full of mistakes. That really isn’t the right role for an encyclopedia in the educational process. I think it basically should be fine in schools, it should be acceptable, to add a footnote saying I did a lot of my preliminary research in Wikipedia just to acknowledge where you got a lot of knowledge. But in terms of citing specific facts, you really should go to the sources and look it up there. Because that’s what you’re supposed to be doing. The encyclopedia is supposed to give you the broad overview not be a primary research tool.
This is exactly the advice I give when asked. Perhaps having the quote right from the horse’s mouth will be useful.
3 Responses to “Jimbo on Wikipedia reliability”
By Karen Bosch on Feb 24, 2007 | Reply
A couple weeks ago I used Wikipedia for the first time as a source for fifth graders to use for research for reports on presidents. We talked beforehand about the need to evaluate what you read and check anything that seems questionable. As we were working, a student called my attention to an article which listed the date of Jimmy Carter’s death as today’s date! Perfect example to learn. We first double checked CNN to be sure that Jimmy Carter was still in good health. And later, saw that the entry had been corrected. Now I have the perfect story to tell next time to illustrate how to use Wikipedia!
By Ed Kohler on Feb 24, 2007 | Reply
Great commentary. Thanks for the highlights. I think Wikipedia is a great starting point for research. Especially with well-documented entries linking to additional sources. Few other sources of information do such a good job citing additional sources of information online.
Showing students the edit history of documents, thus proving that they’re live documents, could be a valuable lesson.