Murley-In Defense Of Wikipedia PDF

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Technology for Everyone . . .*

In Defense of Wikipedia** Diane Murley***

Ms. Murley explains how Wikipedia articles are created and edited and how to use Wikipedia’s tools to evaluate articles. She argues that research instructors should teach students to use Wikipedia properly, rather than trying to convince them not to use it. Finally, she suggests ways in which Wikipedia can be used to help teach the importance of evaluating sources.

Introduction ¶1 I was teaching a workshop on cost-effective research, and we were discussing

free and low-cost alternatives to the expensive resources the students were accustomed to. Someone asked about Wikipedia. I told them that I liked it, but that most librarians and professors did not. One of the students responded, “Yeah, what’s up with that?” ¶2 Her question gave me a nice segue into a discussion of the proper use of secondary resources and the importance of evaluating sources before relying on them. But later I realized that I hadn’t completely answered her question. Why do so many of us tell students to avoid Wikipedia, rather than teaching them how to use it responsibly? Wikipedia has weaknesses that can make citing to it a bad idea. However, if those weaknesses are recognized and evaluated, it is an excellent place to begin researching certain questions. Furthermore, Wikipedia can be an excellent resource for teaching students about evaluating their sources. ¶3 There are several reasons to teach students how to use Wikipedia and other popular web sites, rather than simply telling them not to use them. First of all, they are going to use Wikipedia no matter how many people tell them not to use it. It’s easy to use, freely available, and students find helpful information in it often enough to reinforce their belief in Wikipedia.

* Editor’s Note: “Technology for Everyone” is a regular feature of Law Library Journal. In each article, author Diane Murley reviews a tool that can help law librarians do their jobs even better. To supplement her articles Ms. Murley posts ideas for using technology to improve or expand law library services on her Technology for Law Libraries blog, http://tech4lawlibs.blog.asu.edu. ** © Diane Murley, 2008. *** Web Services Coordinator and Reference Librarian, Ross-Blakley Law Library, Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona.

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¶4 But more importantly, Wikipedia really is a good resource for some infor-

mation.1 On more than one occasion, when I have been looking for some elusive bit of information, I have turned to Wikipedia and quickly found a link or reference to a reputable source that answered the question. I think I have an obligation to teach students how to use such a valuable resource. ¶5 Of course, not all Wikipedia searches return valuable information, and it is important to teach students how to evaluate what they find. In this article, I will provide some background on how Wikipedia articles are written, explain how they can be better evaluated, and point out some Wikipedia articles that can be used to help teach resource evaluation.

About Wikipedia ¶6 Wikipedia was launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger,

who were looking for ways to supplement Nupedia, a project to produce a free, peer-reviewed encyclopedia.2 Wikipedia is written and edited almost entirely by volunteers, a collaborative process that has proved to be a more effective way to create a free, web-based encyclopedia.3 Nupedia has since been abandoned.4 ¶7 As of March 2008, Wikipedia comprised more than nine million articles in more than 250 languages, including over two million articles in English.5 Wikipedia claims 75,000 contributors are regular editors.6 A core group of about 1000 has special administrative powers to enforce conformity with guidelines and policies.7 ¶8 Virtually anyone can edit an existing Wikipedia article without even creating an account or logging in, simply by clicking on the “edit this page” tab at the top.8 Changes are immediately displayed without any prepublication review.9 However, there is an extensive review process to correct any errors or damage, including antivandalism programs, a list of recent changes that is monitored by

1. Jim Calloway’s Law Practice Tips Blog, http://jimcalloway.typepad.com/lawpracticetips/2008/01/ site-of-the-w-1.html (Jan. 22, 2008). 2. Wikipedia, Wikipedia: About, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About (as of Mar. 18, 2008, 07:49 UTC). See ¶ 18 and note 30, infra , for an explanation of the format used to cite Wikipedia in this article. 3. Id. 4. Id. 5. Id. 6. Id. 7. Id. 8. Wikipedia, Wikipedia: Contributing to Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Wikipedia:Contributing_to_Wikipedia (as of Mar. 13, 2008, 22:53 UTC); Wikipedia, Wikipedia: How to Edit a Page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:How_to_edit_a_page (as of Apr. 13, 2008, 15:31 UTC). 9. See Reid Priedhorsky et al., Creating, Destroying, and Restoring Value in Wikipedia, GROUP ’07: PROCEEDINGS OF THE 2007 INTERNATIONAL ACM CONFERENCE ON SUPPORTING GROUP W ORK 259, 259 unpaginated version available at http://www.cs.umn.edu/~reid/papers/group282-priedhorsky.pdf.

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hundreds of editors, and watch lists set up by interested members. 10 Errors and vandalism are usually corrected very quickly.11 ¶9 Adding a new article is somewhat more involved than editing an existing article.12 Only registered users can add new articles.13 New articles must satisfy Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines or they will be deleted.14 The tone must be neutral,15 and the topic must be appropriate for an encyclopedia.16 References to “verifiable, authoritative sources” are essential.17 ¶10 It is not surprising that, on a project that anyone can edit, disputes about content arise, sometimes deteriorating into edit wars.18 Disagreements over content changes are usually resolved by consensus.19 When attempts at reaching consensus fail, disputes are resolved through Wikipedia’s elaborate dispute-resolution process.20

Using Wikipedia to Teach Evaluation of Sources ¶11 Criticisms leveled at Wikipedia usually focus on its unreliability as a citable

source. In general, students and lawyers should not be citing to articles from Wikipedia, or any other encyclopedia. However, Wikipedia can be a great quickreference source or a starting point for identifying other, authoritative sources. Librarians and other research instructors should teach researchers how to use Wikipedia appropriately, rather than trying to downplay its value as a resource. ¶12 Sometimes it is appropriate to cite to Wikipedia articles, and citations are already appearing in journal articles and court opinions. On April 16, 2008, I ran searches in Westlaw’s JLR and ALLCASES databases21 and retrieved 1516 articles and 223 opinions that had cited to Wikipedia articles. Since Wikipedia is obviously

10. Id. at 259. 11. See id. at 265; Brock Read, Can WIKIPEDIA Ever Make the Grade?, CHRON. HIGHER EDUC., Oct. 27, 2006, at A31. 12. For an example of the process, see Ann Kirschner, Adventures in the Land of Wikipedia, CHRON. HIGHER EDUC., Nov. 17, 2006, at B10. 13. Wikipedia, Help: Starting a New Page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Starting_a_new_page (as of Apr. 9, 2008, 21:07 UTC). 14. JOHN B ROUGHTON, WIKIPEDIA: THE M ISSING MANUAL 61–69 (2008). 15. Wikipedia, Wikipedia: Neutral Point of View, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_ of_view (as of Mar. 23, 2008, 22:39 UTC). 16. See Wikipedia, Wikipedia: What Wikipedia Is Not, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_ Wikipedia_is_not (as of Mar. 24, 2008, 13:19 UTC). 17. Wikipedia, Wikipedia: Five Pillars, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars (as of Mar. 24, 2008, 04:56 UTC). 18. Roy Rosenzweig, Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past, 93 J. AM. HIST. 117, 125 (2006). 19. Id. at 124–25. 20. Id. 21. I used terms and connectors searches for “http://en.wikipedia.org” to limit my results to articles and cases that had cited a Wikipedia article, excluding those that merely mentioned Wikipedia.

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being used and cited, research instructors need to teach researchers to evaluate Wikipedia articles so they can use and cite them intelligently. Anonymous Authors ¶13 Like most encyclopedias, Wikipedia articles are not attributed to a particular

author. Unlike traditional encyclopedias, Wikipedia articles are typically edited and expanded by many people in addition to the original author.22 Any new article or added content must be supported by references to reliable sources, which are considered by Wikipedia editors to be the most important part of an article.23 Researchers should also be taught that, in general, the greatest value of a Wikipedia article can be found in its collection of relevant references to other sources. ¶14 Wikipedia’s editing process is transparent, making it a good resource for teaching source evaluation. Each article on Wikipedia has a history tab, which lists the date and time of each change to the article, with links to each version of the article, the user name of the registered user who edited the page or the IP address of an anonymous editor, and information about the changes made. This page is an excellent starting point for evaluating the authority of an article. A “contribs” link for each registered user displays a list of all contributions that user has made. “Talk” pages for both registered and anonymous users may contain comments on the quality of the contributions.24 ¶15 An independent tool introduced last summer can help researchers evaluate the biases of anonymous editors. WikiScanner (wikiscanner.virgil.gr), created by Cal Tech graduate student Virgil Griffith, is a searchable database that cross-references the IP addresses of anonymous Wikipedia editors with information about the companies or organizations that own the addresses.25 ¶16 Wikipedia does not hold itself out as an authoritative source that should be cited. In fact, its article “Academic Use” warns students very clearly that “[i]t is generally considered a bad idea to cite an encyclopedia in academic research papers”; that “any encyclopedia is a starting point for research, not an ending point”; and that “all sources have to be evaluated.”26 Wikipedia articles “Researching with Wikipedia”27 and “Source Evaluation”28 contain similar advice.

22. DAVID WEINBERGER, EVERYTHING I S M ISCELLANEOUS 134–36 (2007). 23. See BROUGHTON, supra note 14, at 65–66; Wikipedia, Wikipedia: Your First Article, http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Your_first_article (as of Mar. 24, 2008 22:47 UTC). 24. See Wikipedia, Wikipedia: Talk Page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Talk_page (as of Apr. 13, 2008, 22:03 UTC). 25. John Borland, See Who’s Editing Wikipedia— Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign, WIRED, Aug. 14, 2007, http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/08/wiki_tracker. 26. Wikipedia, Wikipedia: Academic Use, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Academic_use (as of Mar. 11, 2008, 16:49 UTC) (emphasis in original). 27. Wikipedia, Wikipedia: Researching with Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Wikipedia:Researching_with_Wikipedia (as of Mar. 24, 2008, 15:08 UTC). 28. Wikipedia, Source Evaluation, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_evaluation (as of Oct. 21, 2007, 05:18 UTC).

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Constant Change ¶17 Unlike static web pages, wikis are constantly in the process of change. There

is a very real possibility that the version of a Wikipedia article to which an author cites when writing a paper will not be the version displayed on Wikipedia when the paper is finally published and read. However, with articles on Wikipedia (and many other wikis), the researcher can see and compare previous versions by clicking on the history tab at the top of the article. If there was any disagreement or question about a change, the discussion tab archives the reasons given for those changes.29 ¶18 At least one law school journal, the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, has adopted a special citation format for Wikipedia articles to identify the exact version of the article cited: [Signal] Wikipedia, [article], http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/[article] [(optional other parenthetical)] (as of [date], [time] GMT).30

Inconsistent Quality ¶19 Wikipedia articles are sometimes poorly written and sometimes contain errors,

but that is true of other secondary resources as well. A Nature study in December 2005 found that an average online Encyclopaedia Britannica article had three errors and an average Wikipedia article had four.31 Unlike most other secondary resources, Wikipedia acknowledges that some articles are of better quality than others, and it provides users with information about evaluating articles.32 ¶20 Wikipedia’s best articles are designated as featured articles. Featured articles have been evaluated for “accuracy, neutrality, completeness, and style”33 and determined by a consensus of Wikipedia editors to meet the featured-article criteria.34 Featured articles display a small bronze star in the upper right corner and are listed on the “Wikipedia: Featured Articles” page.35 Good articles are “well written, factually accurate and verifiable, broad in coverage, neutral in point of view,

29. See WEINBERGER, supra note 22, at 137–38. 30. See Wikipedia, Wikipedia: Citing Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_Wikipedia (as of Mar. 25, 2008, 11:54 UTC) and the related discussion. See also the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, beginning with the spring 2006 issue, for examples. GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) and UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) are the same for most purposes. See Wikipedia, Coordinated Universal Time, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time (as of Apr. 12, 2008, 18:57 UTC). 31. Jim Giles, Internet Encyclopaedias Go Head to Head , 438 NATURE 900, 900 (2005); contra ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA, INC., FATALLY F LAWED: REFUTING THE RECENT STUDY ON ENCYCLOPEDIC ACCURACY BY THE JOURNAL NATURE (2006), http://corporate.britannica.com/britannica_nature _response.pdf; but see Nature’s Responses to Encyclopædia Britannica , http://www.nature.com/ nature/britannica/index.html (last visited Apr. 14, 2008). 32. See Wikipedia: About, supra note 2; and Wikipedia: Researching with Wikipedia, supra note 27. 33. Wikipedia, Wikipedia: Featured Articles, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articles (as of Mar. 25, 2008, 03:46 UTC). 34. Wikipedia, Wikipedia: Featured Article Candidates, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured _article_candidates (as of Mar. 25, 2008, 02:15 UTC). 35. Wikipedia: Featured Articles, supra note 33.

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stable, and illustrated, where possible, by relevant images with suitable copyright licenses.”36 They are selected through a nomination and evaluation process37 and are listed on the “Wikipedia: Good Articles” page.38 ¶21 At the other end of the quality spectrum are “stubs,” articles that are too short to meet Wikipedia’s standards but provide enough valuable information and citations to reliable sources that they have the potential to be expanded into fulllength articles.39 Stubs have a notation of their status at the bottom along with a request for help in expanding them. Articles that don’t cite enough references or sources, appear biased, need expansion, or are viewed by some editors as having other shortcomings will display a notation at the top along with an invitation to help improve the article.40 More information is frequently provided on the discussion tab. ¶22 Wikipedia provides many tools that can be used to help teach students to evaluate sources. In addition to the information on article types and criteria noted above, which explicitly spell out Wikipedia’s definitions of quality, students can be shown the notations on articles and discussion pages that raise questions to be considered in evaluating an article. Finally, Wikipedia has many pages that instruct researchers on the proper use of Wikipedia for research, explaining concepts that students should be using to evaluate all sources.41 Vandalism ¶23 Because Wikipedia can be edited by almost anyone, it has attracted its share of

damage by vandals, spammers, and pranksters. Wikipedia has many processes in place to prevent and correct damage to its articles, and damage is usually reversed quickly,42 but damage can slip in unnoticed. Nevertheless, the odds of a researcher encountering a damaged page are very low.43 ¶24 Perhaps the most widely publicized incident of Wikipedia vandalism occurred in 2005. The article on John Seigenthaler, a journalist who had worked for Robert Kennedy and been a pallbearer at his funeral, was edited to falsely state that Seigenthaler was “directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby.”44 The culprit, identified by the IP address of the

36. Wikipedia, Wikipedia: Good Articles, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Good_articles (as of Apr. 14, 2008, 20:39 UTC) (“Good articles are articles which are considered to be of good quality but which are not yet, or are unlikely to reach featured article quality.”). 37. Wikipedia, Wikipedia: Good Article Nominations, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Good _article_nominations (as of Mar. 25, 2008, 14:35 UTC). 38. Wikipedia: Good Articles, supra note 36. 39. Wikipedia, Wikipedia: Stub, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Stub (as of Apr. 10, 2008, 13:06 UTC). 40. See WEINBERGER, supra note 22, at 140–41. 41. Wikipedia, Category: Wikipedia Resources for Researchers, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Category:Wikipedia_resources_for_researchers (as of Nov. 29, 2007, 05:35 UTC). 42. See Read, supra note 11, at A31. 43. See Priedhorsky et al., supra note 9, at 265. 44. Rosenzweig, supra note 18, at 133 (internal quotation marks omitted); Read, supra note 11, at A31. See also Wikipedia, Seigenthaler Incident, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigenthaler_incident (as of Mar. 13, 2008, 19:42 UTC).

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computer he had used, claimed he made the change as a joke on a co-worker.45 That “joke” went undetected for several months, long enough to be picked up by sites like Answers.com and Reference.com, and the incident received a great deal of news coverage.46 Fortunately, damage to Wikipedia is usually repaired more quickly.47 One study found the probability of encountering damage in a Wikipedia article was between 0.0037 and 0.0067.48 ¶25 A more lighthearted incident of high-profile vandalism occurred in July 2006 when humorist Stephen Colbert coined the term Wikiality during an episode of his Comedy Central program, The Colbert Report. Explaining that Wikipedia makes it possible to create “a reality that we all agree on,” he encouraged his viewers to edit the article on elephants to say that the elephant population in Africa had tripled in the past six months.49 Wikipedia administrators quickly placed the article under semi-protection to block the many Colbert fans who attempted to change the article,50 and it still cannot be edited by anonymous or new users. ¶26 Most students will have heard of one or both of these incidents; but even if they have not previously heard of these or similar incidents, the stories can be used to teach students about the need to evaluate resources.

Conclusion ¶27 Wikipedia can be a great research tool if used appropriately. Students and law-

yers should be taught to use it as a quick reference source for nonlegal questions or as a research starting point with references to other, reputable sources. Librarians and other research instructors should demonstrate how to evaluate Wikipedia articles for au...