Chapter Four Reading Reflection

Chapter four contained some practical ideas and concerns about how to use wikis and their inherent traits. Pages 61-3 included some ideas about assessing the accuracy of such open-content sites as wikipedia.org. I will say that I have been pretty critical of the idea of an encyclopedia that anyone can edit. I think Richardson did a good job of supporting the idea that such an entity could very well not only be as correct as a traditional encyclopedia entry, but could be more so due to a better balance of opinions. He even discussed how this affected the way students learned to write in wikis by recognizing their opinions as only opinions and not making blanket statements without supporting arguments.

The idea that struck me the most though was the result of taking this comparison of sources a step further. The real question becomes, “Who can you trust?” We are much less suspicious of the information in textbooks, yet in several education classes I have taken the issue of inaccuracies or biases in textbooks has arisen. The internet definitely has plenty of misinformation, textbooks do too; forget media outlets such as television news or newspapers; research scientists are often “bought out” to produce the results that are desired by their sponsors. I don’t even trust my doctor’s information. It is usually different from the next’s second opinion, which is contradictory of the third doctor’s diagnosis, which makes no sense based on my own health research.

The over-arching lesson in this is the importance of having multiple sources of information and the more the better. In my own research I have seen a truly extreme example of directly contradictory information. Most of the information sources in the case were written as if there was no disputing information, but checking multiple sources quickly pointed out a small war between some toxicologists. The real challenge in that case was in deciding whether to trust a single scientist with no obvious reason for bias or many scientists with very obvious reasons for bias. The plethora of organizations and agencies entering into the fray in the case only added more noise and confusion. Google Tyrone Hayes and Atrazine if you’re interested, but don’t believe anything until you’ve read everything and connected the dots.

I thought the teacher collaboration and classroom applications for wikis that Richardson discussed were useful and well worth trying out. I also wondered if there really were wikis about lots of hobbies and interests like the ones the book mentioned. Searching for some of my own hobbies I didn’t find any collaboratively editable wikis. I did find several sites with areas to post information about a particular location for canoeing or camping, but each entry was a distinct “article” unto itself much like reading online product reviews and many of the entries were very repetitive. This helped me identify one great strength of a wiki – speed. You can quickly read just one “article” and still get a pretty good breadth of information from it.

I decided to do one simple experiment, a wikipedia search of “wikipedia”. The people at wikipedia were smart enough to expect such tricks and so created two paths to choose from. One that explained wikipedia’s history (which I refrained from editing as a test of their watch-dogging abilities) and another that contended with frequently asked questions. The FAQ path addressed the issue of accuracy and mirrored Richardson’s explanation. One admission they made was the simple fact that newer entries with fewer editors were more likely to have fallacies.

That made sense to me, so I decided to try a test of one of the organizations newer projects, wikispecies. I’m a wildlife biologist, so I thought this would be a good project for me to test. I decided to search for the first species to enter my mind, which was the black-footed ferret. The first thing that I discovered was that while wikispecies listed the taxonomic classifications for many species, few species had any information added beyond that. About the only statement listed for the ferret was that it was extinct in the wild, which was once true, but captive-breeding programs and subsequent reintroductions into the species’ old ranges in the last few years has made false. I didn’t feel much satisfaction in knowing enough to contradict the site, instead I was just really surprised that there was such a dearth of information there about what is really a fairly high-profile “poster-species” for conservation efforts. I can’t say I did much to help the fact; I didn’t edit the page. It decided that entry needed someone to come along with a lot more information than I was going to provide off the cuff. So much for broadening the base of mankind’s knowledge.