Rants, Raves and
Revelations – April
Why
Use and Trust Wikipedia—Caveat Lector Let the
reader beware!
By
Harry {doc} Babad — Edited in Part by Julie M. Willingham ©
2008
Introduction
I
recently coauthored and published a book, Nuclear
Energy and the Use of Nuclear
Materials For High School and Middle
School Teachers, which was just
published by EnergySolutions Foundation as a set of CDs, including teacher’s
tools in the form of a detailed PDF presentation. [Please see the end note for
article limitations]
I
mention this because the most broadly focused feedback we received from
independent reviewers was related to our use of Wikipedia for some of the
hundreds of references in the book. We were told by a few academics, mostly
college teachers, that we should have used only primary references, despite
their technical complexity, instead of Wikipedia and other more generalized
references. The commenters claimed Wikipedia references were not trustworthy
when compared to references cited in the Encyclopedia Britannica or published magazines.
Alas,
such trustworthiness arguments also hold true whether reading a textbook full
of primary references or documents that are digests of a particular subject.
Science is grey and evolving, and topics such as nuclear safety or man-made CO2 being the major cause of climate change evolve. Today’s demonstrated truths
rapidly become yesterday’s fairy tales.
I
wholeheartedly disagree with claims that Wikipedia is not trustworthy —Caveat
Lector! This article
tells you why, perhaps in more detail than you cared to read about. (More aboutCaveat Lector later in the column.)
As
facts evolve, we must face the challenge that to remain informed we must keep
challenging universal truths (e.g., “everyone knows…”) about science and
technology. This circumstance is real, regardless of whether the source is
Wikipedia, a science article in The Economist or Scientific
American,
a blog espousing a point of view, a headline in a newspaper seeking sales, or a
study in a medical journal by an author whose work is funded by a drug company.
Remember, we live in a world of changing paradigms; therefore our knowledge
must keep pace if we are not to lapse into judging the technical world on
outmoded and inaccurate information.
Caveat Lector!
In
this article, I focus only on information studies of things that can be
objectively measured by anyone with the tools, or calculated and then
actualized by physical experiment. [E.g., Einstein’s theory of relativity, the
heliocentric solar system, or the number of cancers caused by radiation –
manmade or natural.] Beliefs and faith serve their purposes, but as a whole, at
least in today’s world, can neither be measured nor independently replicated.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method/
Just
remember, as you read on, I’m not talking about books about religion, which are
driven by faith and belief. I, also, hold my beliefs as sacred, but my science
isn’t.
But
let’s define some terms first.
BIAS: is a term used
to describe a preference toward a particular perspective or ideology, which
means all information and points of view have some form of bias. |
BELIEF: is the psychological state in which an
individual holds a proposition or premise (argument) to be true without
necessarily being able to adequately prove its main contention to other people who may or may not agree. |
FAITH:
can refer to a religion, or to another deeply held belief, such as freedom or
democracy It allows one to commit oneself to actions or behavior, based on
self-experience that warrants belief, but without any existence or need for
existence of demonstrable or absolute proof. |
PARADIGM: Since the late
1960’s, the word “paradigm” has
referred to thought pattern in any scientific discipline or other
epistemological context. The Merriam-Webster Online dictionary defines it as
"a philosophical and theoretical framework of a scientific school or
discipline within which theories, laws, and generalizations and the
experiments performed in support of them are formulated”. |
Therefore, bias, error, omission, and just plain mistakes are all
a part of our information sphere —yesterday, today, and tomorrow. The
major differences are that we now, in 2008, have a greater ability to more
broadly and deeply check what we read and hear and to attempt to make sense of
the information available.
More
About Checking Technical Web Sites for Bias, Error, Omission, and Just Plain
Dumb Mistakes.
— You know, googling the subject, not only of Wikipedia reliability, but
also that of blogs, and articles and pages. Many of these documents (pages) are
written by Internet subject experts, other folks with a mission, and of course
political and think-tank pundits. Some of the are articles I reviewed are by
are discipline jumping born-anew experts, say an industrial engineer becoming
an authority on genetic engineering.
Alternatively, a nuclear engineer suddenly
becoming an authority on cancer or nanotechnology.
One
aspect, call it doc’s head check. for evaluating the credulity of a source of
material is an author’s willingness to provided referenced full disclosure of
opposing viewpoints. I found for most of the Wikipedia articles I checked,
where appropriate, differences of opinion or a weakness in basis was noted.
After all it’s what Wikipedia rules {author guidelines} require.
As For Blogs — There are
strong believers out there that who know that blogs are worse than porn. Check it out —
for now I’ll provide only a single link – you can Google further.
See It's Official.
Perhaps this to will become a subject of a
future article.
The
State of Wikipedia Acceptability
Did
you know that Wikipedia publishes a Teachers’ Guide? — Unlike most other
sources of information I use, it provides detailed answers to questions about
the limits of Wikipedia accuracy and reliability.
See About Wikipedia
Part
of the information is related to the rules under which the site operates; the
rest focuses on the feedback and corrections practices used by the site’s
developers.
Teacher's Guide The sections relevant
to this article are listed below.
1.1Is
Wikipedia accurate and reliable?
1.2What
keeps someone from contributing false or misleading information?
1.3Can
students cite Wikipedia in assignments?
1.4Is
it a safe environment for young people?
1.5What
is open-source media?
1.6Why
do people contribute to open-source projects?
1.7Why
have we not heard of this {about Wikipedia} before?
Also
check out: Wikipedia Strengtsh & Weaknesses.
I’m
not going to rehash the contents of the referenced articles providing
Wikipedia’s operating philosophy and rules, which some of you won’t believe
simply because it’s from Wikipedia How about: But name an alternative, broad
source of high quality information that prominently acknowledges both
disagreements and errors.
Some of the media does this in fine print on page 10
of a magazine or newspaper; but never on TV and rarely on commercial radio.
The
teachers’ guide notes, as do other Wikipedia links I’ve provided: “Wikipedia
cannot be perfect. There is almost certainly inaccurate information in it,
somewhere, which has not yet been discovered to be wrong. Therefore, if you
are using Wikipedia for important research or a school project, you should
always verify the information somewhere else — just like you should with all
sources.”
Without
belaboring the point further, I’d like to quote from Bill Kerr, with whose analysis I agree. Bill is an
Australian blogger who frequently and intelligently deals with Internet
censorship in public schools and other related topics.
Bill Kerr’s Concerns (and mine.)
"I am worried about how academics {and
teachers in general}
are treating Wikipedia and I think that it comes from a point of naivety.
Wikipedia should never be the sole source for information. It will never have
the depth of original sources. It will also always contain bias because
society is inherently biased, although its {Wikipedia} efforts towards
neutrality are commendable. These are just realizations we must acknowledge
and support.
“But what it does have is a huge repository of
information that is the most accessible for most people. Most of the
information is more accurate than found in a typical encyclopedia and yet, we
value encyclopedias as an initial point of information gathering. It is also
more updated, more inclusive and more in-depth. Plus, it's searchable and in
the hands of everyone with digital access (a much larger population than
those with encyclopedias in their homes). It also exists in hundreds of
languages and is available to populations who can't even imagine what a
library looks like.
Yes, it is open. This means that people can
contribute what they do know and that others who know something about that
area will try to improve it. Over time, articles with a lot of attention
begin to be inclusive and approximating neutral. The more people who
contribute, the stronger and more valuable the resource.
Boycotting Wikipedia
doesn't make it go away, but it doesn't make it any better either."
http://billkerr.blogspot.com/
http://users.tpg.com.au/billkerr/index.htm |
Why
Include Wikipedia References in Documents and Books?
When
writing our Nuclear Energy textbook, the authors were faced with the problem of
what kinds of references to provide. We had available a rather lengthy and
detailed set of files covering all of the topics in the book including a range
of technical author viewpoints in great detail and the references they
themselves contained. The 600 or so primary or secondary references ranged in
detail from:
- Peer-reviewed technical publications and
full paper conference proceedings, most of which were available on the
Internet.
- Technical position and overview papers by
both US and international nuclear and anti-nuclear advocates and citizen
action groups lobbyists.
- Technical papers written for teachers and
students by US federal and international agencies.
- Other commentary by individuals and groups
that provided a referenced basis for their arguments.
- Wikipedia articles containing reference to
materials we’ve individually reviewed and in which we checked the
contained references for accuracy.
Some
of the cited reference material was published on the Internet, either as
downloadable PDF files or in a Wikipedia article. Our objectives in choosing
references were threefold.
- First, could our target audience understand the information provided by the referenced authors? This was a judgment
call based on working with our teenage grandchildren, children, and a few
teacher friends.
- Reader accessibility of the word was our secondary criterion after assuring
accuracy of the references. This was determined by whether the material
was readily available at no cost to teachers and students, preferably
through the Internet.
- Finally clarity, did the reference
contain a clearly stated and documented discussion of either a technical
topic or a point of view that was rationally constructed and based on
referenced documented evidence? We did not necessarily agree with the
perspectives and view of dissenting authors, but strongly believed our
readers deserved, indeed were obligated, to be aware of them.
As
a result, after careful evaluation of their contents at the time of writing
[May-December 2007] we chose to include Wikipedia references as well as
material written by technical experts that appeared in printed material which
was republished on the web. We recognize that the Internet is ever changing,
unlike a printed book, but we’ve noted, for the most part, that open source
publications such as Wikipedia get better not worse in time, especially when we
checked the articles before selecting them.
Mea
Culpa — We were, alas, remiss in not explicitly dating the individual Wikipedia
references at the time we read and used them, but the publication date of the
books serves as a guideline to that information. However, all references were
checked for accuracy and basis three weeks before publication — burning a
CD is a fast process.
Why
Use Wikipedia?
We
know that all material on the Internet can contain both errors in facts or by
the author selectively omitting information to serve his/her belief set. A
study in the magazine (scientific journal) Nature in December 2005 found
“Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science
entries. (Nature is a peer-reviewed journal.) That investigation studied ”42
{scientific} entries from the websites of Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia
Britannica on subjects that represented a broad range of scientific
disciplines. The articles were analyzed by a team of independent subject mater
experts. They found when the error categories were expanded to include
"factual errors, omissions, or misleading statements" 162 errors were
found in Wikipedia and 123 in the Britannica. That is roughly four per article
for the upstart amateurs and three for the publication that has been around
since 1768. (Nature 438, 900-901; 2005.)
Since
then all the Wikipedia errors have been corrected. The heavily peer reviewed
Britannica claims it was slandered.
LET
THE READER BEWARE — Caveat
Lector
Therefore,
as with everything scientific and technical you read, whether textbooks, an
Internet article, or an entry in an encyclopedia, check out both the facts and
the author’s affiliation. Google it, then draw your own conclusions based on
the evidence. On the Internet, checking facts and looking for biases is easier
than you think. Read the articles, check who sponsors the site, and that
organization’s mission statement. You may not like what you find relative to
possible sponsor bias. I often don’t – but relative to science and
technology, even as an old man set in his ways, I live with it. The best I can
do is sort out half-truths and distortions from substantiated fact. It’s a
little bit like the so called “fact” sheets politicians post on their websites
about their opponents, which show little resemblance to things like the facts
documented in the Congressional Record.
Alternatives
to Wikipedia
You
can search each subject one search topic item at a time in Google. Remember the
way you ask the question will filter your results. Then start reading …all
thousand or hundred thousand hits. Fortunately the most relevant hits are in
the first 100 references (links) Goggle retrieves. [DEVON Technologies
DEVONagent, a shareware program, does even better at eliminating some of the
chaff .] There are also
semi-static encyclopedias on the web. Amazingly they too often lift material,
from open information sources, such as Wikipedia without acknowledging that
fact.
**Therefore,
for our book and for the other articles I write, I base, and will continue to
base, my reference list on the accuracy and availability of the materials using
the criteria defined above. (My professional experience as a technical subject
matter expert with specific credentials to support them speak for themselves,
even in a court of law.)
For
the Nuclear Energy textbook, whether the articles were pro- or anti-nuclear
energy was not an issue. Indeed that was our responsibility; to check both the
individual references (Google) and for review articles such as those in
Wikipedia, their contained references for clarity, relevance and factual
defensibility.
Most
of what we found from antinuclear groups when googling for suitable background
material for the book was irrelevant, inaccurate, or heavily emotionally
biased. I’ve chosen not to cite or list the inaccuracies, but then I’m also not
into ghost stories and other fantasies. Two examples:
- TMI accident killed no one and albeit
expensive to deal with, particularly in the panic environment fostered by
the local and national press, did not significantly increase the cancer
mortalities in the nearby Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, region. If zero is a
number you prefer, stop flying, don’t visit Denver, and stop eating
because food is naturally radioactive as is the world.
- Chernobyl (USSR) was a reactor that had no
containment vessel. You know the dome around the reactor in a nuclear
power station. The Chernobyl Disaster was caused by human error and
compounded by faulty technical design – no containment vessel. TMI had a
containment vessel, which limited release. America has never used
uncontained nuclear reactors nor have any of the nuclear dependent
nations such as France, Japan, Korea or India. Modern nuclear reactors
are being built to even stronger containment standards to thwart
terrorist threats such as those of 9/11.
Those
omitted references we too often found had one thing in common. They contained
no references to the literature at large. At most they represented the circular arguments based
documentation by members of an organization with a cause quoting each other’s
papers.
What
has this to do with Wikipedia? — Well, such filled “belief” articles
were not cited in Wikipedia sources we used, but those anti-nuclear articles
whose logic and basis were defended by factual references, were cited. So these
were not used in our book.
Back
to the Nuclear Energy Textbook and Wikipedia — Therefore such authors did not
provide teacher and student Internet readers with information to make up their
own minds by reading opinions outside of their paradigm-locked club. Therefore
we include references to Greenpeace, the Union of Concerned Scientists, The
Sierra Club, and other groups who document their opinions with hard (albeit a
bit selected) peer reviewed facts. Again we proclaim,Caveat
Lector!
In
Closing
I
will continue to judiciously use Wikipedia as a reference source in my
technical work when I’m writing for a non-technical audience. I shall be giving
that information equal time with more conventional published sources. Let’s
face our collective realities,
no not our TRUTHS; the later is only in the eye of the beholder.
Reality, in
everyday usage, means "the state of things as they actually exist."
The term reality, in its widest sense, includes everything that is, whether
or not it is observable or comprehensible. Isn’t philosophy awesome?
However,
the only ways our concepts of reality have a demonstrable basis would be on
the preponderance of available evidence. This requires an ability to
reproduce observations of any part of the world around us. And of course, the
more we know and study and test what we read or hear or see, the more our
vision of reality changes. |
In
the sense I’ve defined above, the reality of information found in our sources of
information, which can be physically or statistically checked, the closer the
information comes to being valid at any given time. That also holds true to
papers by student using Wikipedia as a reference. Students need to provide more
references than a Wikipedia article, because by itself citing Wikipedia
references is not enough to show an examination of the subject matter.
I
have provided, for you’re consideration, a list of potentially faulty realties,
be they from Wikipedia or your grocery checkout counter’s favorite tabloid.
- Information provided in a 30 second TV spot
by a politician up for election.
- Alleged facts during TV debates about the
environment – folks claiming solar energy is clean energy without
taking full life cycle pollution costs of making the solar cells and solar
arrays into account.
- The actual number of folks who’ve gotten
cancer from radiation released in the Chernobyl reactor disaster or the
TMI accident.
- Information supporting your buying a stock
from someone who gains by making it appear as a good deal.
- Medical information on sites owned and
operated by those trying to sell you cures.
- Facts about people and issues by those who
have a vested interest in their TRUTH such as many TV and Internet talk
shows that take information out of context or just plain lie to get their
message across.
- Most advertising that claims superior
performance about a product in LARGE print and provides you actual
details in tiny print.
My
bottom line: the more subjective the topic, the more room there is for bias or
error or omission. At issue, it is and always will be hard to prove the reality
of subjective information, despite the number of people who treat that
information as TRUTH.
Therefore,
do your homework. Remember, according to doc_Babad, grey is more beautiful than
black or white. The more important the decision, the bigger the challenge of
the homework assignment, but pick a topic and start checking… it will brighten
up your mind
LET THE READER BEWARE
— Caveat Lector
PS
The
last time I’ve checked, no one has yet written me up in Wikipedia, nor have I
written any articles for them.
PPS
Check Out
Teachers
and Wikipedia
Trusting
Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Errors
END
NOTE:
This
article reflects my personal opinions. It neither reflects those of my
co-author, Dr. Raul A. Deju, nor that of the books publisher, Energy Solutions
Foundation.
Harry,
aka doc_Babad
