by Hannah Stewart

Wikipedia—a site more commonly referred to as: “I don’t want to see this cited in your paper.” We’ve all heard the academic rants, the long-winded lectures on Wikipedia’s lack of credibility. Nearly every class I’ve taken since my junior year of high school has involved at least one word of warning from the teacher before any essay was due. But is it really so bad? Can a site that’s grown so popular and that holds such a vast amount of information really carry such a dark connotation? For years, I’ve believed that Wikipedia couldn’t be trusted as far as it could be thrown. But, after conducting my own research—which I intend to lay out hereafter—I have experienced a sudden change of heart.

I had always accepted that Wikipedia was not to be trusted based solely on the words of my professors. It was not until reading Cathy Davidson’s essay “We Can’t Ignore the Influence of Digital Technologies” that I thought it deserved a closer examination. In this essay, she explains her position in the ever-deepening debate of Wikipedia’s reliability. While she admittedly has an investment in its acceptance, she delivers a strong argument for its furthered academic use, with the main focus placed on the fact that “Knowledge isn’t just information, and it isn’t just opinion. There are better and worse ways to reach conclusions, and complex reasons for how we arrive at them” (Davidson 170). Her riveting argument captured my attention, and drove me to dig deeper into the issue.

Upon this decision to take a closer look at the topic of Wikipedia, I discovered Katherine Mangu-Ward’s essay “Wikipedia and Beyond: Jimmy Wales’s Sprawling Vision.” Her work, written in a tone quite similar to that of Davidson’s, began as a simple lunch meeting with Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales, but grew to encompass the complete history of Wikipedia, including its political underpinnings and what the future may hold. However, she successfully placed the focus of her piece on Wales’s vision of Wikipedia, both at its beginning and now. According to her, the goal of this man that “lives in a house fit for a grandmother” (Mangu-Ward 250) is simply to “make the internet not suck” (Mangu-Ward 251). This, of course, was not a deep enough definition for Mangu-Ward. Later on in her work, she makes the well-supported claim that “The reason [Wikipedia] works isn’t that the world was clamoring for a new kind of encyclopedia. It took off because of the robust, self-policing community it created. Despite its critics, it is transforming our everyday lives; as with Amazon, Google, and eBay, it is almost impossible to remember how much more circumscribed our world was before it existed” (Mangu-Ward 253). This argument touches on a number of questions hinted at in Davidson’s essay as well, and points directly towards Yang Heng-Li and Lai Cheng-Yu’s work, “Understanding Knowledge-Sharing Behaviour in Wikipedia.”

In Heng-Li and Cheng-Yu’s work, the strange phenomenon of people’s willingness and drive to support and invest in this open source of information is placed beneath a microscope. They state, “Wikipedia, the online free-content, wiki-based encyclopedia, is a prominent example of user participation and collaboration . . . However, relatively little empirical evidence has been found to explain what drives individuals to share knowledge in Wikipedia and their satisfaction to it” (Heng-Li and Cheng-Yu 131). Throughout the rest of this work, Heng-Li and Cheng-Yu take a unique approach to the topic by investigating the mindset behind this community of Wikipedia users, which delves into the accuracy of the site as a whole. Their findings were concurrent with that of Cathy Davidson’s assertion that “studies have shown that errors in Wikipedia are not more frequent than those in comparable print sources” (Davidson 167). Both Davidson and Mangu-Ward went on to make the point that “as in a market, when a failure was detected, people rushed in to take advantage of the gap and, in doing so, made things better than they were before” (Mangu-Ward 256).

All three of these sources came to nearly the same conclusion. They insinuated that, after all of the research conducted on the topic, the primary reason people devote their time and resources to this site—one often deemed lacking in credibility—is for the “reputation” (Mangu-Ward 261) that comes with posting and editing consistently within its pages. Not only is this important to note for uses of Wikipedia outside of simple research, but it is a key point in the argument of credibility as well. As Mangu-Ward states so clearly, “Users who catch others at misdeeds are praised, and frequent abusers are abused. Because it’s so easy to get caught in one stupid mistake or prank, every user has the incentive to do the best he can with each entry. The evolution of a praise/shame economy within Wikipedia has been far more effective at keeping most users in line than the addition of formal rules to deal with specific conflicts” (Mangu-Ward 262-63).

At the end of the day, the battle over Wikipedia’s credibility is one that will rage on for many years to come. In my opinion, Wikipedia, though proven to be a much stronger source than I first suspected, should be limited to what Jimmy Wales calls a “starting point,” a place to wrap your arms around your topic of research and discover more reliable sources in the annotations (Mangu-Ward 258). However, as hinted above, I believe there is great potential in Wikipedia for things much larger than your average research.

While Davidson gives a great introduction to the topic of Wikipedia as a resource that served to perk my interest, she fails to delve deeper into the broader uses of it. Mangu-Ward gives a much wider view of Wikipedia as a whole, and answers many questions about the motivation behind and purpose of the site itself, as well as gives insight into its founder’s mind. Heng-Li and Cheng-Yu give a beautiful, in-depth assessment of the psychology of Wikipedia, and the affect it has on both readers and contributors. All together, they create a marvelous image of what Wikipedia is, what it does, what we can expect to come from it, and how it can be used as a tool of research.

However, while they answer many questions and serve to inform us greatly about Wikipedia, one great question still remains. If Wikipedia is such a mind-boggling, powerful device, why is its usefulness in academia sloughed off as nothing but a “starting point” research tool? As Davidson stated so well in her essay, “Wikipedia is not just an encyclopedia. It is a knowledge community, uniting anonymous readers all over the world who edit and correct grammar, style, interpretation, and facts. It is a community devoted to a common good—the life of the intellect. Isn’t that what we educators want to model for our students?” (Davidson 167). Can we not find many other ways this place of peer review and dedication to the passing of correct information can be used? In a world of students learning the importance of English composition, shouldn’t we encourage the use of a tool that makes peer revision readily available? Are there appropriate times and ways for Wikipedia to enter the classroom as anything more than a warning? Can this site be used to the advantage of teachers and students? These are questions that continue to knock around in my own mind, questions that I feel need to be addressed and considered in schools of all levels. I intend to direct my focus and research at them in the future.

Works Cited

Davidson, Cathy. “We Can’t Ignore the Influence of Digital Technologies.” Trans. Array The Digital Divide. Mark Bauerlein. 1^st Edition. New York: Penguin Group, 2011. 166-71. Print.

Heng-Li, Yang, and Lai Cheng-Yu. “Understanding Knowledge-Sharing Behaviour In Wikipedia.” Behaviour & Information Technology 30.1 (2011): 131-142. Academic Search Complete. Web. 7 Mar. 2013.

Mangu-Ward, Katherine. “Wikipedia and Beyond: Jimmy Wale’s Sprawling Vision.” Trans. Array The Digital Divide. Mark Bauerlein. 1^st Edition. New York: Penguin Group, 2011. 250-70. Print.