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  • New Thinking on Wikipedia: Not Evil

    By Oronte September 3, 2008 11:59 pm

    Have you had the experience recently of your physician turning her computer screen toward you and googling something she needs to know? I have, twice in a month, and I have to say, it was a little disconcerting.

    I thought the natural order was that patients, hungry for any scrap of information about their health, googled and read up on medical topics so they could ask dumb questions of their doctors. The doctors, playing their parts, were supposed to say in stentorian tones, “No, that’s a common misconception. You must have been reading the Wikipedia entry for dysbaric osteonecrosis!” After all, don’t they teach things in med school that you can’t learn in the first dozen hits of an online search?

    But both my family doctor and a neurosurgeon (I’m fine) googled things for me as I sat with them recently and looked on. The brain surgeon in particular thought Wikipedia is great. He said he makes his interns use it when they ask questions, and then he proceeded to give me an hour of basic instruction on Internet use. (He also said doctors don’t have to be very smart, they just need good memories, and admitted he had no idea what many of the medical terms meant on the Wiki entry he was looking up.) Hey, I am the Internet, pal, I wanted to tell him, but he had knives and loves to use them.

    I use Google, Wikipedia, and other first-responder tools all the time, but I do know my way around a library and have enough research experience to have a feel for when a source is adequate. For instance, I needed to remind myself today which year women’s suffrage was enacted—an important fact to get right but one that’s easy to check (and crosscheck, if you want).

    On the other hand, I wanted the lyrics to a song called “Make Believe” from the early ‘20s. It wasn’t all that important to my book, but I wanted it. Felt that need? It’s like the hunger for air during a breath-hold. Not only could I not find it easily online, I fell down that familiar well of context—who wrote the lyrics, what else he penned, who he worked with, what sorts of things he wrote about, etc. And I never could pin down the difference between “Make Believe” and something called “Make Believe and Smile,” leaving me wondering if the latter was the extended title, or something else entirely, or just a mistake. Any time there’s a hitch like this, I slow way, way down, even for something trivial, and get myself to the shelves (or change it to something I know).

    But you should hear English TAs on the subject of Wikipedia. Hoo-ah. We must fight it with all means at our disposal, by which they mean verbally denouncing all open-content sources to the rhet classes they’re teaching. Then they ban it from the research and writing process. One young guy was so disturbed by the various drafts that he tracked over time for the entry on Auburn University that he couldn’t speak of them calmly, and couldn’t shut off, so on several occasions he finished with his class and came into his group office raging at anyone who would listen.

    After my experience with the doctors, I’ve felt less self-conscious about my constant but measured use of online sources including Wikipedia. I noted today that in the August 2008 issue of American Libraries, the magazine of the American Library Association, several people weigh in on its use, including the editor, a feature writer, and professional librarian readers. They’re all in favor of it, especially as a “centerpiece around which to teach searching and critical reading skills, as well as evaluation of a resource’s content,” as the author of the article “Dissecting the Web Through Wikipedia” says. Adam Bennington asks us to

    Embrace the enemy: In the end, students are going to use Wikipedia anyway. If they don’t access it from school, they will look at it from home or another library. If they don’t cite it directly in a paper, they will probably have at least looked at an entry, and it may wind up influencing them. Librarians and other educators may as well capitalize on the opportunity to use the resource as a teaching example as well as to make the profession and its skills more relevant to students…. Evaluating resources they find through Google or Wikipedia will be critical when using that information to make decisions.

    Let’s get this thing going then. I want my doctors to have the best possible skills for diagnosing by Wikipedia.

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Comments on New Thinking on Wikipedia: Not Evil

  • Maybe they should try this instead?
  • Posted by Carrie , Librarian at Liberal Arts College on September 4, 2008 at 8:55am EDT

  • "Doctors, Ph.D.s to edit new Wikipedia of medical information- from http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9110541

    "Medpedia site is backed by health care heavies like the Harvard, Stanford medical schools
    By Heather Havenstein

    July 23, 2008 (Computerworld) A project launched today aims to create what is in essence a medical version of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia focused on explaining conditions, drugs, procedures, medical facilities and other topics written by physicians and Ph.D.s.

    The Medpedia Project launched a preview of its site on Wednesday with the support of medical heavyweights such as the Harvard Medical School, the Stanford School of Medicine, the University of Michigan Medical School and the University of California Berkeley School of Public Health."

  • Posted by Oronte on September 5, 2008 at 8:40am EDT

  • Thanks! I guess specialized forms of open-source are the future. I wonder if they'll be free--or intelligible--to the public?

    I'm working on Churmpedia at the moment. It's got all the specialized knowledge one needs to live in this house. The current entry is: Spiders in the basement.

  • Research for Dummies
  • Posted by Cyndi Vander Ven on September 9, 2008 at 12:35am EDT

  • It is interesting that on a day when I had to give an administrator two respected journalistic articles to overrule a Googled entry for the spelling of one of my titles, I find myself appalled after reading this article and its bland acceptance of Adam Bennington's advice to "librarians and other educators" to use Wikipedia as a "teaching example as well as to make the profession and its skills more relevant to students." As a librarian, perhaps he is willing to stake his profession's relevancy to students on the back of a (wide) open source tool, but as an educator and composition teacher, I am not.

    I teach literature and composition to juniors and seniors in high school. It was a very tough job in a public school of several thousand students, primarily a low-income, minority, immigrant population, and it is not much easier now that I teach in an elite, private school with small classes, where each high school student is issued a laptop computer, and where all of the graduates are college-bound.

    No matter the students, teaching them to write and to write well is a challenge. I've also taught college composition, and it was the same story except that the students had more motivation--at least at the beginning of the semester or before Rush began. Virtually all students from the high school junior level and up suffer the same syndrome -- last-minuteitis -- writing the night before/period before the paper is due -- and to get the research they need, it is ever-so-tempting to go to what is quick, and the quickest tool is Wikipedia. I can never stress enough to my students that their fellow students are as likely to be editing the pages they're quoting as are scientists and other experts. That may be a slight exaggeration, but only slight.

    At the school where I teach, even our middle school students add to Wikipedia with an unjustified pride. The thought processes behind many who post to Wikipedia is pure and simple hubris: if I know it, then it must be worth sharing. Those of us who are well-educated (and I hope that includes your neurosurgeon, although I have my doubts if he didn't know the meaning of several words on the particular Wiki page he engaged) hopefully are able to tell the difference between the nascent ramblings of an undergraduate philosophy or critical theory major on Hegel or Dickinson and a fuller, richer scholar's account. My juniors and seniors, and even freshmen in college, cannot be counted on to make this distinction, nor can educators take time to show students their mistakes in identifying these imposters because of the sheer number of hits the students are making on Wikipedia in their search--at the last minute, usually--for their sources.

    Because of its unverifiable credibility, and because of my students' inability to distinguish between scholarly and amateur research in many cases, I made the choice some time ago, similar to Middlebury College's History Department, to disallow Wikipedia as an essay source. And it was an easy decision.

    In an age where everyone wants higher standards for our students, better education, no child left behind, higher test scores, etc., etc., I just ask that when it comes to educators, we not let our guard down and allow research standards to be lowered because of the "easy access" of the internet. I am a tech junkie--web, blog, online design, PhotoShop, you name it. But I still have high expectation of my students, and I want them to own writing/research skills that meet excellent standards for college and for the workforce someday.

    Bennington said, "Evaluating resources they find through Google or Wikipedia will be critical when using that information to make decisions." If that is the case, then we don't need to worry with The Atlantic (June/July 2008) whether Google is making us stupid, we will have done it to ourselves. And them.

  • Posted by Barbarian Ganoush on September 9, 2008 at 5:50am EDT

  • When I was an undergraduate--I got my BA in 2000, so I'm not officially an old fogey yet-- using an encyclopedia (a traditional one) as a cited research source for a paper would only have betrayed one's utter lack of research skills and lack of effort.

    Using an encyclopedia source for more than rudimentary background information and to get a preliminary list of sources to *begin* more serious research shows that there is something very wrong with an undergraduate's intellectual and analytical development. If that encyclopedia source is Wikipedia, which is riddled with (often very hard to perceive) errors and half-wrong statements, then the problem is even worse.

    I have a rule for myself (and my friends, who in turn help keep me honest) when it comes to Wikipedia: we will only read entries that are either on pop culture (TV and movies) or on subjects where we already know the topic well enough to vet the information the Wikipedia entry might provide. Not only does this underscore the extremely limited utility of Wikipedia (try it sometime, and see how many errors and weird "facts" you find when you already know what an entry should say) but it also keeps us intellectually spry, and honest about our own tendencies towards mental laziness. I strongly believe encyclopedias are a place to start, not a place to end, and I'll continue to teach my students this-- no matter how much Wikipedia (or Encyclopedia Britannica for that matter) happens to improves.

    I am more appalled, however, by the corollary to the growing reliance on Wikipedia and Google: many students (sometimes very smart ones) no longer know, or even try to learn, how to use the specialized library databases they have access to at my (supposedly close-to-Ivy-caliber) university. Even after taking time out of class to bring them to the library for a training course on how to use these databases, many continue to stay in the shallow end of the 'net courtesy of Google and Wikipedia, rather than try searching more deeply using the appropriate tools. Google has a fictive allure-- students think it is a compendium of all available online information (it ain't), when in fact using Google for academic research is akin to dumpster diving. As a historian, I am all too aware that poorly sorted information, especially if there's lots of it, is just about as good as no information at all.

    And personally, I've seen some lousy docs in my time, but if one of them ever resorted to Googling a medical term in front of me, (googling to find, say, current research on a particular drug might be different, but even then, medical professionals have many specialized databases and better tools than Google for this) I would run out of that office as fast as my sick little body could manage.

    Sorry for the rant, OC. But I expected better than this from ya.

  • Mea Culpa
  • Posted by Barbarian Ganoush on September 9, 2008 at 5:50am EDT

  • You know, I think I was way too tired the first time I commented to see the largely tongue-in-cheek nature of your post. It must have been all those hours I spent earlier this evening reverting Wikipedia entries. That'll teach me.

  • Posted by Oronte on September 9, 2008 at 10:45am EDT

  • Semper vigilans, Cyndi.

  • Me-a Culpa, too
  • Posted by Cyndi Vander Ven on September 9, 2008 at 9:10pm EDT

  • Qui scribit bis legit: He who writes reads twice. Or should.

    I ascribe my inability to sniff out a sense of the tongue-in-cheek to the late hour during which I was reading/writing and a day of senior papers being due but mostly not turned in on time. Blech. That said, what I said, I still say, except that I never hop on blogs (sounds Dr. Seussish) to soapbox; I save that for my closest friends and colleagues, poor souls. My apologies. Oh, and ignore that ugly subject/verb agreement error.

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