Banning Wikipedia - a Case Study

Banning Wikipedia

        When it comes to the topic of Wikipedia, most of us will readily agree that Wikipedia is the most expansive and popular reference tool on the Internet. Where this agreement usually ends, however, is on the question of using Wikipedia as a credible source for college work. Whereas some are convinced that it is perfectly acceptable to use the website as a main source for your research, others maintain that due to Wikipedia being open to anyone for topic creation and editing it should be thrown in a trash can and lit on fire. Ok, that last statement is hyperbolic, but from the way I’ve seen some academics speak about Wikipedia, I do not consider it to be that much of an exaggeration. I believe this group misses the mark with their criticism because while there are negatives and positives with using Wikipedia as a source, the responsibility to be factual ultimately falls on the individual who is making the argument, not on their chosen source(s).

        Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001 by founders Larry Sanger and James Wales (Wikipedia.org, About). The goal of the endeavor was to make an open content, collaboratively-built encyclopedia. According to the website, by the end of 2001 Wikipedia had approximately 20,000 article entries and 18 language editions. Since then the English page has amassed over 5.5 million pages of content with almost 1 billion edits (Wikipedia.org, Statistics) and, Wikipedia has adopted the slogan “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” (Wikipedia.org, Main Page). The second part of that slogan encapsulates some of the main criticisms of Wikipedia as a research source.

        Since its inception, Wikipedia has faced criticism when it comes to the factual reliability of its content. One specific problem is that unpopular topics do not to receive the same level of review as more popular topics. Of the review process former Middlebury College history professor Neil Waters said, "the qualitative record is much spottier, with reliability decreasing in approximate proportion to distance from “hot topics” in American history” (15). Therefore, if an error is made in the content of an unpopular topic a substantial amount of time may pass before the error is corrected. Intentionally false information put into popular articles is a different side of the same coin of popular articles being more heavily edited. According to a 2015 article in the Washington Post about Wikipedia, researchers believe that vandalism is a critical concern when it comes to popular topics. They found the topic of Global Warming is edited an average of two to three times a day. In some cases, large sections of text are deleted and replaced with the phrase “global warming is a sham”. Wikipedia in the past has taken steps to combat this. There have been instances when Wikipedia has temporarily frozen changes and prohibiting anonymous editing (Ghose). The site also has an army of editors ready to quickly correct false information and scrutinize sources.