A couple of disturbing things came to my attention in the last week regarding the alarming trend/misperception that Wikipedia is a reliable source of credible factual information. Wikipedia does contain facts, but those facts are tainted with opinion, hearsay, and just plain jokiness in some entries.
The first thing that I learned was that an acquaintance's doctor's office had given him/her a printout of medical information from Wikipedia to use as a guide. (Sacre' bleu!) Even if the doctor wrote the Wikipedia him or herself, unless that doctor reverifies the info in the article every time it is printed and issued to the patient, the possibility exists that the Wikipedia entry might have been tampered with and contain useless or even hazardous information at the time it was printed.
I discovered the second thing the day before yesterday when I was googling and I went to an About.com entry and discovered that the About.com post was using Wikipedia for its information source. Somebody better warn the teachers.
Apparently About.com relies on "guides", experts in a field, to gather information from the web on their area of expertise and post it on About.com for random internet users to access. About.com is now owned by the New York Times. You think they would know better; journalistic integrity and all that.
The latest thing I came across is the news that Google is creating somthing called knols (apparently a "knol" is a unit of knowledge comparable to the "util of satisfaction" from the utility theory of economist, Thorstein Veblen , the guy who invented the term "conspicuous consumption") Google wants to use the knols concept to move into the Wikipedia -About.com field of intenet user-generated information; experts contribute their knols or something like that. I just hope it is not just another pile of Wikipedia-style truthiness.
All this just goes to show that alot of people simply believe anything that comes off the internet if it is packaged nicely. I plan to keep on pushing the electronic databases and googling with the +edu to try to get better info for my patrons.
Here are my multi-disciplinary "explanations" for what is wrong with using Wikipedia for a reference source.
In mathematic terms -
Wikipedia =Facts + Nonfacts
Facts + Nonfacts = Nonfacts
Therefore Wikipedia = Nonfacts
In literary allegorical terms -
Using a quote from Shakespeare's Macbeth to make an allegorical reference to the above mathematic explanation of what is wrong with Wikipedia:
"No, this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas in incarnadine, making the green one red."
Symbolic Meaning: The blood on the hand of Macbeth symbolizes the taint of nonfact, which makes the green sea of fact one big red nonfact. (I'll let you figure out where the commas can go in that statement.) (English Major Joke Alert)
In historical/social science terms -
The fierce tribe of nonfacts with their superior weapons of confusion are always able to overcome and conquer the delicate, social order of the tribe of facts. Nonfacts efficiently subjugate and absorb the fact tribe members so that the nonfact tribe becomes even stronger. Even though the former fact tribe members sometimes appear unchanged, close examination reveals that facts act as nonfacts as long as they merged.
In philosophical terms -
Unless you are an expert, you can not know with certainty that the info in a Wikipedia entry is factual.
If you are expert enough to know the info you find on Wikipedia is factual, then you don't need to use Wikipedia to get info on the area of your expertise.
Therefore people who use Wikipedia are not expert enough to know they are getting bad info.
In conclusion people who want to get facts about a subject that they are not experts about should use a credible source (like an encyclopedia or electronic database) rather than Wikipedia.
Philosophy is not my strong point so my logic may be flawed. Perhaps I should consult Wikipedia...
Macbeth is contemplating washing his hands in the photo from the Creation Theatre Company's 2006 production of MacBeth in Headington Hill Park, in Oxford, UK. Available at
http://www.dailyinfo.co.uk/images/theatre/macbeth-creation-blood.jpg . Accessed 4/22/08.
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