As the fall semester wraps up and students find themselves writing final papers and researching, many head to the internet as a source of information. But before confidently citing the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia in bibliographies, students should pause to consider the recent high-profile error concerning the biography of journalist John Seigenthaler.
Seigenthaler read his own biography on Wikipedia, a free internet community-produced encyclopedia, and found, to his surprise, that the article said he was involved in the Kennedy assassinations of the 1960s. Posted on May 26 and available until Oct. 5, when it was deleted from the website at Seigenthaler’s request, the article was an instance of what he called “internet character assassination.”
The author of the Wikipedia article in which Seigenthaler was misrepresented remains anonymous. Wikipedia does not require anything but a username and password for its account holders. Users are traceable by internet protocol addresses, but the 1996 Communications Decency Act allows online corporations to withhold the identities of users unless a court subpoena is issued.
Discouraged from pursuing legal action, Seigenthaler responded to his Wikipedia character attack with an opinion piece in Nov. 29’s USA Today. In his article, Seigenthaler, a retired journalist who had worked as Robert Kennedy’s administrative assistant in the early 1960s, called Wikipedia a “flawed and irresponsible research tool.”
“Of course Wikipedia is flawed — sometimes spectacularly so. But in many instances, it’s a great starting point,” said Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. “The articles that have received the most attention and controversy are typically the best researched and most balanced. I’d trust it less for obscure topics.
“Serious scholars and proto-scholars need not only to cite sources, but to be able to evaluate the sources and that which the sources say,” Zittrain added. And skepticism regarding resources should not stop with the internet, he said.
Most Boston University students are aware of Wikipedia and say they use it as a research tool.
“I’ve used Wikipedia for every paper this semester,” said College of Arts Sciences freshman Kevin Gendreau. He was aware that “a lawsuit or something” had recently damaged the credibility of Wikipedia and added that he checks his information with more traditional resources like Encyclopedia Britannica. Gendreau said there is nothing wrong with listing “Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia” on a works cited list, and he appreciates Wikipedia’s huge reservoir of information.
“The same critical eye can be trained to evaluate and then make use of information from Wikipedia is one that ought to be as discerning when drawing from ‘approved’ literature,” he said.
Wikipedia is inherently different from traditional research tools. Its name derives from “wiki” — a type of server software that allows users to modify web pages — and “encyclopedia.” Wikipedia was started by Jimmy Wales in January 2001. The predecessor of Wikipedia is the now defunct “Nupedia.” That enterprise, however, was dependent on an editorial system comparable to that of a print encyclopedia, with many stages of pre-posting editing.
Anyone — with the exception of those whose IP addresses have been blocked for deliberately destroying content — is allowed to edit Wikipedia articles.
“How it gained momentum is a real puzzle,” Zittrain said of Wikipedia’s success. “But now that it’s up and running, there are people who love being part of Wikipedia’s community. They’re not simply editing articles, but discussing their edits and working through suggestions and disputes with other Wikipedians.
“Wikipedia’s most meaningful contributions are a notion that it’s possible for far-flung people — strangers, really — to meaningfully collaborate on intellectual work, and a notion that knowledge about the world can be truly up-to-the-minute,” Zittrain said.
Tom Casserly, head of reference and instructional services at Mugar Library, doubted that the authority of Wikipedia compares to that of other, more traditional sources. Although Casserly called Wikipedia a “fascinating experiment,” he said “it’s not what I’d call an authoritative source.
“You can get a thing fast, cheap, good — but you can only get two of the three at one time,” Casserly said, relating a saying he learned in library school. Wikipedia, in his view, is both cheap and fast, but not necessarily good. Casserly said because “authority [is] dependent on the collective knowledge and/or contributions” of persons without scholarly credentials, the “scholarly debate” that is necessary to verify knowledge does not occur on Wikipedia.
“It’s a game,” Casserly said of the editing and re-editing that occurs on the site. Although Casserly conceded that Wikipedia does have value for helping students to get a cursory idea of research topics, he stressed that BU libraries make more than 200 databases and resources available on their website. These reliable sources are culled from the internet by the university’s librarians. In many cases, BU pays for students to have access to these sites, he said.
But many students said they will continue to use Wikipedia, even if they know its accuracy may be dubious.
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