WICKEDpedia, Forgotten Libraries, and the Blessed (?) Shifting Baseline of Academic Research

I had been sort of gravitating towards Wikipedia for general look-up stuff. you know, the reasons you select an encyclopedia in the first place. you want some thing brief on a topic you know little about. you expect it to be, well, accurate.

then you get into an entry that you happen to know a little about and find it to be full of inaccuracies, to say the least.

it makes one worry about the accuracy of things that one knows little about...how do I know when I look up "mozart" that the salieri fans haven't been up to a bunch of mischief?

I allow my students to use Wikipedia only as a reference tool. They can consult it to come up with a list of terms that they can then look up in book indexes and plug into databases and indexes such as JSTOR and MLA (good places for locating articles about English literature) in order to locate substantial and authoritative sources. In addition, to minimize the likelihood that they will throw the project together at the last minute, they have to progressively turn in a certain number of one page summaries of their sources, each summary attached to a printout or photocopy of the source. This practice cuts down on plagiarism, too. At the end of the semester, they must resubmit the summaries and printouts with the finished paper. They know that if their citations don't match their sources or they have misused their sources, they will be in a world of trouble. This system might at first glance look like a lot of effort for the instructor, but in fact the commitment of time at the beginning of the semester saves both the instructor and student a lot of work at the end of the semester.

I'm not sure things really are very different. In the "old days", which you can count me into, people would look for papers just like you say.

Or not. Rather, people would a) find a long list of papers, sigh, and pick the three or four with the most appealing titles, skim the abstract and conclusions for any hint of relevancy and cherry-pick a few pertinent facts without even actually reading the surrounding context; or b) leaf through any handy reference book or field overview and lift any fitting quotations and references collected by the author without ever actually finding and reading the source - or, in many cases, actually spell out that they're just referencing second-hand.

Wikipedia is great. It's just like a paper encyclopedia in that you can quickly come up to speed on a subject and find a good set of pointers to actually dig down and get the facts you're looking for. And unlike a paper encyclopedia it will change faster and cover a lot more odd subjects than it's predecessor. No, you can cite it as an authoritative source. But after grammar school, neither can you cite an encyclopedia.

In fact, I think the whole wikipedia-as-academic-shortcut is overblown. After all, most uses of it is not in an academic setting. You want to check up on something just to get a rough definition, to find some particular fact you've forgotten or something similar.

There have always been inaccuracies in publishing, of course, and they can be magnified by lazy library research. But Wikipedia really does represent an entirely new kind of animal, and poses a significant danger to objective scholarship in an era where rationalism is already under siege from various quarters. This is why several universities (e.g., Bennington in Vermont if I remember correctly) have banned citation of Wikipedia entries in student assignments.

Fortunately, there's an alternative (a 'Wikipedia with quality control'): The Encyclopedia of Earth. And it needs your help -- check it out!

I was surprised to find that this past semester many of my science courses has explicit "Wikipedia is NOT a legitimate source" printed on report requirements pages. While I agree that there are many who do openly abuse the internet to merely copy and paste information without learning anything, I do think it can be important as a source if used correctly. There have been plenty of times when I've looked a subject up on Wikipedia in order to find references (usually paleontology-related papers that are the sources for the wiki entry), but I do realize that there are plenty of students who prefer the condensed version to the source material. Basically, I think it can be valuable in getting a rough idea of a topic and having a number of otherwise hard-to-find references collected in one place, but there are a number of students who seem to go no further than copying and pasting as this post suggests.

You pose a good question.. something I often discuss. I think our generation falls somewhere between the kids who don't remember the Dewey decimal system and the old timers who wrote it all out by hand.

Of course, I can't imagine college without email, let alone wikipedia. Peer-review is important, and misinformation abounds on the internet. I'm not sure where I fall as far as the ever-increasing speed of the information superhighway. Speed and ease vs accuracy? They shouldn't be mutually exclusive.

I disagree with the, "there have always been examples of laziness and inefficiency," mentality. This issue is like the digestion efficiency curve of a rabbit eating grass. Give it a little, and most of what is consumed will be assimilated. Gorge it on super-saturating amounts and most will go through unprocessed. And will go through quickly. Which is what our society is turning into: massively consumptive, minimally assimilative information gorging machines, spewing out piles of undigested waste. While TiVo'ing everything within reach to put it all on youtube. Yeeha!

I may be biased, being a science librarian and all, but if profs want their students to use peer reviewed journal literature there's no substitute for getting some sessions set up with a librarian in a computer lab to show students how to use PubMed or whatever to find high-quality online articles, both open access and ones that are paid for by the library's subscriptions.

I think the key is for profs to require the use of at least some real articles and reward students in the marking of the papers. Wikipedia is great, I use it every day, but in an overwhelming information environment, we shouldn't expect students to know how to find the right mix of the best stuff in the easiest way without actually showing them.

John,
Great comment. I have always found the librarian resources underutilized (in a formal setting, at least). This is a comment I recently posted in reponse to Carl Zimmer at The Loom, who will be attending a media science conference and asked for requests/suggestions from the blogging world:

It seems there are a lot of recommendations for better sourcing of information in the blog world, including links to original articles. If I was in your shoes, I would appeal to the scientists to ensure that the journals they publish in make a concerted effort toward making articles available via open access. After all, scientists do not get paid to publish and their work is largely funded by taxpayers (especially the NSFers). Everyone should have the ability to access and read the work and hopefully even benefit from it. Bloggers can help lubricate this process (and voice the work's messages) but the research must first and foremost be available to everyone...

From your experience, what is the rate of movement toward open access journals? From my little exposure to it, I have found that the journals have made it a bit bureaucratic to consent to articles being published open access. Assuming this system will eventually be adopted in full, Wikipedia (and its users) will certainly benefit: when Wiki cites a scientific article as a source, it would be accessible by everyone.

Jennifer, I agree that if everything were available freely then at least some of the problems would go away. I definitely encourage people to publish OA or to self-archive their articles on their own websites or in a disciplinary repository (like arxiv for the physicists). However, one of the big hurdles that's only starting to come down is that the old-school journals are seen as more prestigious at tenure time. Similarly, many of the most important journals are society based and societies have been mostly very hesitant to go OA because they really fear the loss of revenue from their publishing programs. Needless to say, for commercial publishers like Elsevier, OA is the devil.

At this point, I would say only 10% or so of all newly published articles are true open access (as opposed to just self-archived), maybe less in some fields. I think it'll take 10-15 years for any real progress to be made, mostly driven by a new generation of scholars that will be starting to be in influential positions in research and publishing in that time frame.

In the mean time, one of my frustrations is that many profs seem to hope that students will learn good research habits by osmosis, probably because that's how they did it x years ago. The environment is a lot more complex and students are a lot more confident in their pre-existing abilities to find stuff that the best way to help them make better choices is through making it more directly part of their education. Even in an all open access world, peer review, journals, conferences, good data will all still be important.

(sorry for getting all librariany on you, btw ;-)