Mon Feb 6 14:35:39 EST 2006
Jesse Vorst wrote:
> Sumitra refers to Wikipedia. Social scientists should be aware of the
> "openness" of this so-called encyclopedia. I keep finding factual
> errors and editorialised histories in my students' papers for which
> they gave W. as the source. My latest course outline requires
> corroborating evidence to accompany references to Wikipedia entries.
> The widespread lack of W's reliability was, again, illustrated a few
> days ago when U.S. Congressional staff was found to have changed
> biographies of their political masters. Disinformation for the
> masses (or whatever Orwell called it)?
Disinformation? What about some facts:
News item:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4530930.stm
<<
[...]
In order to test its reliability, Nature conducted a peer review of
scientific entries on Wikipedia and the well-established Encyclopedia
Britannica.
The reviewers were asked to check for errors, but were not told about
the source of the information.
[...]
>>
Source data:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/full/438900a.html
Wikipedia (dis)information about above data:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:External_peer_review/Nature_December_2005
If teachers didn't teach students to check multiple source in the paper
world, the move to the digital world is indeed an excellent occasion to
move from bad to good teaching :).
There are many good questions raised about source, trust and authorship
of information by the emergence of wikipedia and of the online world, I
hope teachers and historians are agitating them before their students as
food for thought.
Sincerely,
Laurent Guerby