use

This page considers use of wiki content.

It covers -

• introduction
• what use - what are people using wiki content for?
• schools - academic responses to Wikipedia
• hoaxes and hubris - falsification and wikis as a form of vanity publishing

     introduction

Preceding pages of this profile have noted the problematical nature of much wiki content, with hype about "the wisdom of the crowd", rapid correction of errors through "crowdsourcing" and "user generated content" (UGC) being used to justify material that is of an unknown quality.

Put simply, wiki content may be superb or may be trash: a user cannot assume that there has been meaningful quality control. More so than for information in a major traditional reference work, the user should treat claimed facts and analysis in a wiki with caution.

That has meant some institutions discourage students from relying on Wikipedia and other wikis, most directly by prohibiting citation of Wikipedia in K12 or university assignments. It has been reflected in a range of hoaxes, with anonymous authors creating spoof wiki content or editing existing content. Criticism of such subversion is likely to strengthen Wikipedia's drift towards an increasingly hierarchical editing system disguised by rhetoric about community participation.

     what use

What are people using wikis, in particular wikipedia, for?

The answer, unsurprisingly, is that there is considerable uncertainty about what wiki content is read, why it is read and what use is made of the information.

Commercial metrics services for example essentially highlight Wikipedia as a major destination, rather than dissecting visitations to specific pages or interest in particular subjects. Much academic research regarding Wikipedia has centred on authoring rather than use of content and has often been a battlefield in the 'wiki wars' noted earlier in this profile. There has been little published quantitative research on what students, journalists and other people are actually doing with Wikipedia and similar UGC resources.

One indication of 'top of the pops' destinations on wikipedia is here.

A small-scale survey of Australian university students and public servants in 2007 indicated that around 68% of interviewees reported using Wikipedia several times a month, whether directly or via entries found in a Google search.

Most used the resource for orientation, with reliance on 'facts' such as dates but wariness about the analysis or interpretation provided in a particular entry.

Some commented that it is useful as an indication of 'common knowledge'; others said it is of problematical value but useful as a "starting point for real research" or as entertainment ("must have for trivia questions").

     schools

Academic responses to use have reflected differing perceptions.

Some criticisms of wiki, in particular prohibitions on citing Wikipedia, are based on perceptions that students are simply lifting online text - as previous generations lifted text from Funk & Wagnalls or the Britannica - in preparing homework.

Other teachers have argued that an underlying concern is lack of appraisal and critical thinking: students should develop their own ideas and learn to evaluate the authority and sources of texts, whether online or off. The anonymous and volatile nature of wiki content means that such appraisal may be beyond the skills of most readers.

Such critics have noted that readers often tend to discern 'spin' in entries but are more accepting of what is presented as fact, whether information such as a date (particularly a date that is not immediately verifiable online by a non-specialist) or the supposed historicity of an individual, institution or event.

Other teachers have "drunk the kool-ade", embracing some of the sillier populist rhetoric about wiki as necessarily empowering and self-correcting, in contrast to "authoritarian" resources such as traditional encyclopaedias.

Studies include 'How today's college students use Wikipedia for course-related research', an article by Alison Head & Michael Eisenberg in 15(3) First Monday (2010).

     hoaxes and hubris

UGC, more than content subject to investment in reputation and formal editing processes, has inevitably spawned hoaxes. Some of that subversion is benign, for amusement. Some is malicious and even directly defamatory.

Connoisseurs of Wikipedia are thus noting nonsense such as the entry on the Funerary Violin (supposedly a musical genre "almost wiped out by the Great Funerary Purges of the 1830s"), the battle of Blenau (a fictitious 1652 French naval victory), Henryk Batuta (a supposed Polish revolutionary and associate of Ernest Hemingway, whose entry was online for a mere 15 months) and Brian T**by (supposed leader of a League of Nigerian Liberation or Organization for African Democracy).

Alan Mcilwraith - discussed elsewhere on this site - apparently created his own Wikipedia entry, presumably less taxing than awarding himself sundry military honours.

Joshua Adam Gardner received media attention when he misrepresented himself to the students and staff of a Minnesota high school as a fictional fifth Duke of Cleveland.

More famously, a malign hoaxer created a page on US political figure John Seigenthaler Sr falsely suggesting that he was involved in the assassinations of John F Kennedy and brother Robert. The defamatory content was undetected for months; Seigenthaler experienced major difficulty gaining a correction of that identity pollution from "the crowd".

He commented that

I have no idea whose sick mind conceived the false, malicious "biography" that appeared under my name for 132 days on Wikipedia, the popular, online, free encyclopedia whose authors are unknown and virtually untraceable. ... Wales, in a recent C-Span interview with Brian Lamb, insisted that his website is accountable and that his community of thousands of volunteer editors (he said he has only one paid employee) corrects mistakes within minutes.

My experience refutes that. My "biography" was posted May 26. On May 29, one of Wales' volunteers "edited" it only by correcting the misspelling of the word "early." For four months, Wikipedia depicted me as a suspected assassin before Wales erased it from his website's history Oct. 5. The falsehoods remained on Answers.com and Reference.com for three more weeks.

In the C-Span interview, Wales said Wikipedia has "millions" of daily global visitors and is one of the world's busiest websites. His volunteer community runs the Wikipedia operation, he said. He funds his website through a non-profit foundation and estimated a 2006 budget of "about a million dollars."

And so we live in a universe of new media with phenomenal opportunities for worldwide communications and research - but populated by volunteer vandals with poison-pen intellects. Congress has enabled them and protects them.

When I was a child, my mother lectured me on the evils of "gossip." She held a feather pillow and said, "If I tear this open, the feathers will fly to the four winds, and I could never get them back in the pillow. That's how it is when you spread mean things about people."

For me, that pillow is a metaphor for Wikipedia.

Lore Sjöberg offered a faux FAQ

The person who was accused of murdering Kennedy didn't realize that it's his job to monitor his own Wikipedia entry at all times and fix mistakes. By not doing so, by allowing his entry to contain libelous information, he was in essence accusing himself of murdering Kennedy. The Wikipedia board of directors is hoping that the courts will accept this as a confession and convict him of assassination. At that point, his Wikipedia entry will be 100 percent true, proving that the system works.

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