Britannica isn't the Pope

Slashdot yesterday provided this link to "Errors in the Encyclopedia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia."

The page lists 62 of them, in fields ranging from history and biography to math, science and linguistics. This one, for example, is on "Pushkin in Bohemia":

It is a basic fact of Russian history that the tsarist administration never allowed the poet Alexander Pushkin to go abroad, a nuisance that he deplored in Eugene Onegin and other verses. Therefore, Britannica's assertion that "frequent guests" of Karlovy Vary included Alexander Pushkin and Tsar Peter I the Great is untrue. -- Ghirlandajo10:27, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

Certainly the study of history, just like every other academic field, advances through debate, conflicting interpretations or selections of evidence, the discovery of new source materials, and the evolution of critical theories.

As I've contended before, that's the rough, sometimes contentious process through which all human knowledge must pass before it achieves status of generally accepted truth. And Britannica, as an artifact created by fallible human beings, may include the occasional facual error, without having its overall credibility and authority challenged.

But the point of this story is that Britannica is not infallible, and that authentic scholarship is happening at Wikipedia, as well.

Knowledge, information, and generations

Loyd Case at ExtremeTech wrote a fascinating comparison of how different generations view information:

"I think ... that the baby boomers tend to view information as simply words, pictures and diagrams. My older daughter regards information as something that's mutable, and that flows, not as something fixed and chiseled in stone. We see that on the Internet, too, as people experiment with mashups of different media, with information (data) mixing freely with algorithms to create different ways of looking at the world."

Case attributes the difference to the difficulties my generation faced in simply acquiring information the old-fashioned way, through laborious research using alphabetized categories and the Dewey Decimal system, in contrast to the ease with which today's students can locate almost any fact with a few keystrokes. My own students give me disbelieving looks when I tell them that a 30-second piece of research they've performed on LexisNexis would have taken up to an hour during my undergraduate days.

Case contends that this ease of finding information is also "creating a generation of skeptical kids who can better sort out bad information from good information." Our generation, by contrast, "had to rely on editors and peer review to uncover bad information. Even then, bad information would propagate, and would often take years to correct."

While much hand-wringing occurs each time a factual error is discovered on Wikipedia, it's astonishing how quickly mistakes are corrected online, bad data replaced with good data, the vigilance of the online information community in spotting errors. The result, Case says, is that the new generation is one of "editors, synthesizers, and creators" equipped with tools to build knowledge structures we could never have imagined.

Trust us -- we're scholars!

I've just completed grading final papers for my six spring quarter classes, and am pleased to report that Wikipedia has not yet brought an end to education, truth, or even western civilization. My students gathered material from multiple sources, checked facts, and developed their own reasoned arguments based on the best available data.

For teachers who are still concerned over the evil menace of Wikipedia, though, the Online Education Database (OED) is offering Top 7 Alternatives to Wikipedia. It's an interesting list, in that it contains not only the predictable Scholarpedia and Encyclopedia Britannica Online, but also the conservative wiki Conservapedia, as an answer "Wikipedia's alleged left-wing bias."

By including Conservapedia, the OED (not to be confused with the Oxford English Dictionary) tries to balance an alleged leftist bias with one that is overtly right wing, as a matter of that site's stated policy. On Conservapedia, "The information found on this site is free of foul language, sexual topics and anything else deemed offensive by the site's editorial staff." One certainly doesn't wish for knowledge that would offend anyone's sensibilities, after all.

In short, OED find one cultural perspective acceptable because it results from a centralized editorial authority . . . but a different perspective unacceptable because it has emerged from the actions of a social network of volunteers with similar interests. Although the OED seems to be gently mocking in its tone toward Conservapedia, their own bias toward authority is clear.

The OED prefers information and knowledge to flow top-down from an acknowledged authority, rather than to emerge bottom-up from a community. Why? Because "it is hard to imagine that millions of anonymous users could accurately maintain a factual and unbiased living encyclopedia. Wikipedia is a non-profit site that is policed by hundreds of volunteers, yet very few of these volunteers have the experience and knowledge of a professional writer/editor. A cultural bias has seemed to have washed over many entries on the site, as general consensus replaces cold, hard facts."

OED prefers the model of Scholarpedia, where "Experts must be either invited or elected before they are assigned certain topics and, although the site is still editable by anyone like a wiki, updates must first be approved before they are made final." But implicit trust in this type of authority-based system is based on two shaky assumptions: 1) that the authority is disinterested in the way this knowledge will be used or interpreted, and 2) that the authority doesn't harbor any cultural biases of its own.

But anyone who's spent more than a few years in academia and research institutions knows that scholars and experts are never disinterested, or free of cultural bias. Their careers and professional reputations depend on how what becomes of the data and information they generate. It's almost impossible to put a half dozen PhDs from the same field in a room without witnessing internecine warfare.

It's not just on Wikipedia that "consensus replaces cold, hard fact." Knowledge has always emerged from conflict between competing ideas, viewpoints and factions. It does not descend like cooling rain from the heights of Parnassus, where saintly scholars confer in whispers. On Wikipedia, at least, the struggles, conflicts, errors and missteps that are part of the process of arriving at the truth are made public. I, for one, have no objection to my students becoming aware of that process.

I think it's appropriate for the academic community to be wary of Wikipedia, and to caution students not to blindly trust its facts. But the same caution should be given for all sources of information, including the alternatives to Wikipedia offered by the OED. Each is a human product with its own limitations, agendas and biases.

Gatekeepers and publishing

This weekend, I co-presented a workshop with Assistant Professor Judith Anderson at Columbus State Community College's annual creative writing conference, this one titled "Genres and Generations." Our workshop dealt with the opportunities Web 2.0 has opened to artists, and how writers can use blogs and social networking to attract and build an audience for their printed work.

During an afternoon panel discussion on creative nonfiction, someone in the audience raised a question about blogging as a form of the essay. The panelists answered that bloggers were, essentially, narcissists, a waste of bandwidth and of time. This judgment drew sharp objections from the floor, including several from participants in our morning workshop. They countered the stereotype, arguing that many bloggers are intensely aware of and involved with the world around them, linked in a network of communications with others who were often passionately committed to issues, interests and causes.

The keynote speaker for the conference had been Walter Mosley, who on Friday night read from his book This Year You Write Your Novel. Mosley encouraged the audience to invest the time and effort in attempting to write their own stories. One audience member asked Saturday's panel how Mosley's injunction squared with their condemnation of earnest bloggers who are dedicated to writing. The response was that bloggers are certainly permitted to write, but they're wrong to publish.

Publishing, the panelists agreed, requires gatekeepers, to minimize the dangers that unmonitored publishing might pose to society and to individuals. The discussion then switched to the topic of fraudulent material that had been posted on Wikipedia. (Never mind that Wikipedia isn't a blog. All hypertext is equally suspect.)

The panel was composed of people whose wit and judgment I hold immense respect for, but I must disagree with them on this point. I believe they view the Internet simply as simply a different delivery method for the printed word, rather than as an entirely new medium. But the two are different. Print, as McLuhan pointed out decades ago, is mechanical and explosive. It fragments the audience into individual, specialized readers. Hypertext is electric and implosive. It tends toward a tribal structure of deep involvement, a breakdown of barriers.

Print-oriented academics, I believe, see the blog as a private journal (including all the form's associations with paper, ink and handwriting) that has been posted online merely for the sake of the writer’s vanity. A small percentage may, in fact, be that.

The true blog, though, begins as unmediated electronic text, posted as a statement in an ongoing conversation. It's not a matter of isolated words designed to be contemplated in tranquility. It's a voice speaking in a village, in a chorus or babble of other voices. As long as the social structure of the village is healthy, the service of a gatekeeper, deciding who may or may not speak, is not required.

Middlebury College prohibits Wikipedia research

A story from C/Net News, referencing an orginal article from the New York Times, reports that the History Department at Middlebury College has decided to prohibit students from "using Wikipedia as a research source in tests & essays."

The core issue at Middlebury appears to be questions regarding Wikipedia's reliability as a source for academic work, and whether college students should even be using encyclopedias (online or not) in research projects. Of course, they shouldn't.

As a writing instructor, I worry that my students who use Wikipedia (despite my warnings not to) aren't receiving the kind of fact-checked, professionally-vetted material available from more traditional print or electronic sources. I'm even more concerned over plagiarism, however.

I encounter an increasing volume of papers each quarter that either quote directly from Wikipedia without quotation marks, or borrow information from it freely without citation. Most of these papers come from students who understand what plagiarism is and would not deliberately commit it. It seems that because Wikipedia articles are "authorless" communal projects, students don't regard wholesale borrowing of information and language from them as plagiarism.

Online research tools, especially Wikipedia, challenge long-standing academic ideas regarding the authority, authorship and ownership of ideas and information. That is a much deeper issue than reliability, one that won't be resolved by a simple ban on students using the encyclopedia.