Popular online encyclopedia, plagued by errors, troubles educators

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The word on Wikipedia: Trust but verify

Popular online encyclopedia, plagued by errors, troubles educators

March 22: NBC's s reports on a new trend among schools —

not allowing Wikipedia as source material for reports.

By s and

MSNBC and NBC News

Updated: 2 hours, 18 minutes ago

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. - Neil Waters had never seen anything quite like it.

" I was looking at a stack of final examinations, " said Waters, a

professor of Japanese studies at Middlebury College in Vermont, " and

I found several instances of misinformation that [were] identical

from one student to another. "

All of those students in Waters' Japanese history class late last

year had been steered wrong by the same source — Wikipedia, the

sprawling online encyclopedia that has revolutionized how ordinary

people find information.

Wikipedia is a marvel of Web innovation and utility, but the incident

in Waters' class, added to several celebrated controversies in which

entries for famous people were found to be false, raises a troubling

question: Just how accurate is Wikipedia, and can you trust what it

tells you?

For Middlebury College's history department, the answer is plain: Not

totally, and not always. The department banned students from using it

as a source in their papers, although they are allowed to consult it

for background material, a move that was quickly mimicked by

professors at other schools, including UCLA and the University of

Pennsylvania.

Harnessing the wisdom of the masses

Wikipedia is different from traditional encyclopedias in one crucial

respect. Instead of seeking out recognized authorities in hundreds or

thousands of fields to write its articles, it lets anybody —

everybody — write them. And it also lets anybody edit nearly all of

them at will.

The idea is that the large Wikipedia usership will yield experts on a

particular topic. The back and forth as they debate and tweak entries

should, in turn, yield a deeply reviewed and credible consensus

article.

But the sheer size of that usership means tens of thousands of

changes are made each day to Wikipedia's nearly 1.7 million entries

(that's in the English version — there are Wikipedias for nearly

every significant language on Earth, including Esperanto and even Tok

Pisin, a Creole spoken in northern Papua New Guinea). And while

Wikipedia has a large staff of moderators and trusted editors, it can

take a while for entries to be reviewed.

If you happen to consult an entry that hasn't been fully vetted or

edited — or one that's fallen victim to a flurry of disputed edits by

folks with axes to grind — you can get into trouble.

Just this year, a Wikipedia entry falsely proclaimed that the

comedian Sinbad was dead. ( " Saturday, I rose from the dead, " he

said.) Golfer Fuzzy Zoeller sued last month to find out who

anonymously posted, falsely, that he abused drugs. And a prolific and

highly trusted contributor believed to be a professor was unmasked as

a 24-year-old college dropout.

Wikipedia comes clean

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales presides over a burgeoning empire.

Wikimedia, the site's host, has expanded into textbooks,

republishable content, news, shared media and online project

coordination. It all rests on Wikipedia's reputation as an always

available, convenient and reliable repository of the world's

knowledge.

But as controversies have grown, Wikipedia has had to fight to uphold

its reputation. One way it now does so is by acknowledging its

shortcomings.

" Reaching neutrality is occasionally made harder by extreme-viewpoint

contributors, " it says, and it warns that " Wikipedia makes no

guarantee of validity. "

" Please be advised that nothing found here has necessarily been

reviewed by people with the expertise required to provide you with

complete, accurate or reliable information, " it says in a general

disclaimer.

`Hacked to bits by hoi polloi'

That unreliability draws critics who say Wikipedia allows a forum for

information vandals and propagandists. One of them is Larry Sanger, a

co-founder of Wikipedia with Wales and its first editor.

While making it clear that he appreciates the merits of a project

like Wikipedia, Sanger said in an article on the technology site

Kuro5hin in 2005 that users are forced to take authors' claims of

expertise on faith and can be sandbagged by vandals at any time.

" If the project was lucky enough to have a writer or two well-

informed about some specialized subject, and if their work was not

degraded in quality by the majority of people, whose knowledge of the

subject is based on paragraphs in books and mere mentions in college

classes, then there might be a good, credible article on that

specialized subject, " Sanger wrote.

" Otherwise, there will be no article at all, a very amateurish-

sounding article, or an article that looks like it might once have

been pretty good, but which has been hacked to bits by hoi polloi, "

he added.

The conclusion is that users who rely on Wikipedia are running a

risk. And for students whose research will be graded by real, honest-

to-goodness experts in the classroom, that is probably too big a

risk, said Sree Srinivasan, a journalism professor at Columbia

University and visiting professor of new media at the Poynter

Institute, a journalism education organization.

" We need to teach our students that, basically, information on

Wikipedia can be updated very easily, " Srinivasan stressed.

On that point, even Wikipedia agrees.

The ban at Middlebury College " is a great idea, " said Jim Redmond, a

Wikipedia administrator and editor. " Students shouldn't even be

tempted to use Wikipedia as an original source. "

s is a correspondent for NBC News. is a

reporter for MSNBC.com.