In Defense of Wikipedia
Each week, I give my interactive communication students a theme focusing on a key element of the Web and that element’s influence on our culture. This past week was “wikiweek,” when my students and I look at “open-source” or cooperative encyclopedias like Wikipedia and their impact on knowledge.
As usual, my acceptance of Wikipedia surprises my students. They remind me that every professor, administrator, and school they’ve previously encountered treats Wikipedia like plagiarism—a form of cheating so base it only deserves a passing warning on a syllabus before class begins.
I love to play the contrarian like this, not just because I love challenging student (and university) thinking, but also because the Web and its complexity deserve the reassessment.
Every Web element we explore in my class indicates growth in human knowledge. Written forms like the wiki, the hyperlink, the avatar, the word algorithm, and the tweet are positive literary and academic evolutions.
Like any technology, communication advancements come with thorny questions and potential for misuse. The same was true for the motion picture, the newspaper, the book, and the ink. History shows we will become a more complex and nuanced people in response. We’re angry about the Internet right now because we fear it. The way forward, through the fear and alongside the Internet, is education.
Authorities that ban Wikipedia in the classroom do so out of inexperience and misinformation. The dismissal is reactionary, like many responses to the Web these days. People don’t understand the nuances of wikis, so they scoff at them with a menace and a weight wikis don’t deserve. That’s always been the wrong way to approach the unfamiliar.
Wikipedia is not an academic source. I agree with that, and so does Wikipedia itself. It states on the website, “any encyclopedia is a starting point for research, not an ending point.”
Yet Wikipedia is an impressive source for sources. Their “Good” and “Featured” articles offer solid lessons in uniting a rich compilation of esteemed references through written expression, creating what we call knowledge. They are the best examples of bibliography and exposition you could hope to find.
Students—in universities, especially high schools, even grammar schools—should edit and build Wikipedia to understand the fallibility of sources. Wikipedia lessons will also teach them bias, fallacy, the preservation of ideas as rooted in creative expression (i.e. how to write well), and that knowledge is a conversation in which they can participate.
In a semester of practicing and scrutinizing online writing formats, students find the wiki article is one of my hardest assignments. I agree. They assume the hard part is finding an article to write, that every topic is covered by now. That’s not true. There is still a lot missing within Wikipedia and much to rewrite and improve.
The hard part is the writing.
My students learn to value rewriting a wiki just as much as drafting their own. While new Good and Featured wikis appear every day, many articles are only adequate or worse. An expert with a gift for expression could improve even the best articles, which holds true for all knowledge. Even Einstein’s ideas could be improved upon.
I ask students to follow Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines, and learn from them. I don’t make them publish. I suggest students with the strongest submissions make that effort to do so.
Occasionally, they do publish, and their work is so good that Wikipedia’s worldwide team of expert editors barely makes a change to the writing. That’s high praise. Writing a successful Wikipedia entry is akin to top-level journalism.
When my students write as this level, I still remind them all they have done is share existing knowledge well. Wikipedia won’t accept their original research or ideas because they haven’t been appropriately vetted. If you have your own ideas, then you have to prove them, and get published professionally or academically, and become a source yourself.
I point out the logo of Wikipedia, a globe made out of puzzle pieces that is incomplete, because our knowledge is vastly incomplete. To find the missing and invisible, look at the knowledge that exists and find the missing spaces between.
I wrote about how Twitter grows daily in spite of the calls for its funeral. Wikipedia also continues to grow in influence despite its naysayers. YouTube and Facebook recently adopted Wikipedia as a voice of reason. Wikipedia’s new page preview feature rewrites the manual on hyperlinked knowledge too.
Wikipedia and wikis in general remind us that knowledge is not leather-bound, eternal, or easy, but fallible, forgettable, difficult to discover and to preserve. Knowledge is in our hands, and what we know is a fragment compared to what we do not.
That is what really makes people nervous.