Wikipedia In the Classroom:
The Process and Debate Over Mass Collaboration As a Resource
By Matthew Binginot and Kathleen Buckley
University of Vermont
“What we are doing is bringing democracy to knowledge. Definitions will greet
us as liberators.”
–Stephan Colbert
Introduction: The Pursuit of Knowledge and Technology
We have entered a new age. Around us is an unprecedented explosion of
technology, and at a rate like never before mankind is advancing and pushing new
boundaries in the realm of science. Now more than just a tool of commerce and
industry, technology has pushed the frontiers of the existence of mankind,
supporting new forms of communication, education, art, accessibility, and even
entertainment. It has changed mankind and humanity itself. We hold highest our
marvel of the worldwide internet as the frontier of communication, uniting us and
empowering us all in the pursuit of knowledge. As we all know, the internet is not
governed; it is based on the social construction of knowledge. The billions of
internet users are free to create, access, and utilize its contents. Because of this
young and powerful tool, the true revolution has begun. We are the forefront of
mass collaboration. Our institutions of learning are battlefields of this revolution,
and for better or worse, mass collaboration has changed humanity.
The vanguard of mass collaboration is Wikipedia Encyclopedia. According to
Alexa, Wikipedia is the sixth most visited website throughout the world. As of
November 2009, it boasts over 13 million articles (3,056,000 of which are in
English) and grows by the second. Its users are more numerous every day, yet it still
remains a non-profit organization free of advertisements, delays, or accessibility
limitations. Not only this, the Wikimedia Foundation now hosts full dictionaries,
quote books, web hosting, university materials, news, species lists, online books, and
more. However, through the explosion of this internet source, the demons of mass
accessibility cast shadows upon this tool and suppress the revolution itself. One has
to forget speed and ease to question the validity of its information. Has the social
construction of knowledge reversed education’s progress?
This investigation will explore Wikipedia as the symbol of mass collaboration
technology in pursuit of knowledge. As students, educators, and productive
members of society, we must understand mass collaboration in order to question its
validity. Much of this discussion, in fact, will use Wikipedia itself a source. Taking the
form of a debate, this investigation will bring light to the newborn world of the
worldwide internet.
The Wikipedia Way: How Wikipedia Works
The word “wiki” comes from the Hawaiian word for “quick”. Combined with
the word “encyclopedia”, the word Wikipedia has become a culturally recognizable
term to describe a fast, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia.
It is amazing how many people use Wikipedia without knowing how the
information they are reading has been created. The concept of Wikipedia started in
2001. Founders Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger desired to publish an online
encyclopedia available to anyone, but their previous attempt at having an expertcreated encyclopedia quickly fell short of their expectations. Wales and Sanger were
then introduced to the concept of the wiki, a concept that allowed for mass
collaboration by any number of willing participants, not just field experts. They
revised their encyclopedia concept, and created a format that would allow anyone
with a computer to write and revise the online database of articles.
Wikipedia editors, commonly known as Wikipedians, are over 11 million in
number. Although many edit rarely, over 300,000 Wikipedians have edited over ten
pages by claim to expertise in a certain subject. Others add to pages, which are
described as “discussions”, by uploading images, expanding article content, cleaning
up grammar, or by finding scholarly citations to back up the articles themselves.
Quite predictably, “editing wars” often arise over subjects of controversy when
users constantly override each other’s positions in disagreement. History, politics,
news, and other such subjects can be very biased, therefore Wikipedia promotes
unbiased, fact-based discussions. Anyone can be a Wikipedian, so unfortunately
contributors often use its accessibility with ill intent by “vandalizing” certain
articles. To police these infractions, certain volunteering users have gained the title
of “administrators”, whom are not employees of the Wikimedia Foundation but
instead have been trusted by employees to protect (block from edits), delete, or
facilitate pages or Wikipedians. Wikimedia employees handle complaints about
administrators. As of November 2009, 1,696 English-speaking users were
administrators, although they were outnumbered 1,801 to 1 in the English-language
pages they police. However, many editors take the job seriously; in form, every
editor who shares the Wikipedia standards is an administrator. Wikipedia keeps
security tabs on all editors and their contributions, celebrating the top “qualityadhering” editors yearly. The current standing champion is Rich Farmbrough whom
has edited 436,259 pages as of October 2009.
The Wikimedia Foundation employed only two people through 2006. The
American chapter of Wikipedia now employs 35 registered employees, half of whom
work on technology while the other half work on community and volunteer
outreach. The Board of Trustees involves nine members, while the Advisory Board
is comprised of sixteen members. As surprising as these low staff numbers are, it
reminds us that Wikipedia is a fully non-profit organization. It’s core principles are
based around volunteerism and donations. The success of Wikipedia led to the
creation of other “wiki” projects such as the Wiktionary dictionary, Wikiquote cited
quote lists, Wikibooks of user-written books, Wikispace website creator, Wikisource
of free text sources, Wikispecies species list, Wikinews, Wikiversity college projects,
Wikirecipes, Wikitravel advice, and more. No part of the Wikimedia foundation
involves advertisements or limitations. (All information from Wikipedia pages)
A New Age: The Optimism of Wikipedia
A 2006 article featured in Nature Magazine by Jim Giles discussed how the
study of science was suddenly being dominated by use of Wikipedia. Initially,
professionals in the field of science tested 42 science articles for content. On
average, they found that Wikipedia often had four errors per article, however
Encyclopedia Britannica, the pioneering encyclopedia of digital non-collaborative
“printed” information, had three errors per article. This commonality of inaccuracies
promoted further investigation. A second study involved professional reviewers
reading 50 random articles in print without knowing which article came from
Wikipedia or Britannica. In all of the articles, eight serious errors were found. Four
were from Wikipedia, and four from Britannica. (Giles, 2006) This immediately
sparked a great controversy. Despite objections to the study by Britannica, a seed of
doubt was planted; should even our scholarly sources be held in such reverence?
Wikipedia, as well as the internet as a whole, has given a whole new meaning
to time with current events. Most encyclopedias are updated yearly, but even so
there are many important updates that are left out. Crovitz and Smoot explained this
in their article “Wikipedia, Friend Not Foe”. The investigation uses the example of
the Virginia Technical Institute shootings to show how the event was documented.
Updated with initial news reports only two hours after the first incident, this article
soon came to be 5,000 words in length with over 127 cited sources. “Because
Wikipedia is constantly evolving,” state Crovitz and Smoot, “its entries often include
unconventional sections that may never have been included in a traditional
encyclopedia.” (p. 93)
Although the millions upon millions of websites of the internet host
important information, it is the unified sense that makes Wikipedia unique. Rather
than searching through multiple search engine results or thumbing through indexes
in books, Wikipedia makes use of cross-references so that its users can quickly jump
between articles. This also helps define difficult terminology or concepts by
supplying access to in-depth information on their page. For an article to pass
Wikipedia’s quality standards, it must employ cross-references for synonymous
terms. Amazingly, across quality articles is a consistency of cross-referencing. It is
not done excessively, and all hyperlinks (marked by blue text) must connect with a
full article or else it is not cross-referenced. Many people casually browsing
Wikipedia can find themselves exploring information and using cross-references to
end up on a totally different subject than the one that they started on!
Most feared on Wikipedia is the act of vandalism. How can we trust so many
cited facts when Wikipedia sites exist at this very moment with acts of harassment,
falsities, or wrongful citations? An early Wikipedia study by Waldman unearthed a
user on the Nazi Holocaust page by the chosen name “Hitler” pushing for the
deletion of the entire holocaust discussion. This user renamed the page “Holocaust,
LOL” (laugh out loud) and continued to make several extremely offensive edits. He
was deleted and blocked from Wikipedia. Others have used Wikipedia’s popularity
for amusement. For a random example, a user edited the band Nickelback’s page by
claiming “The vacuum created by Nickelback’s sucking has more force than a black
hole,” and that “the War in Iraq is the result of Nickelback.” Others misused cross-
references to link elsewhere, such as the Nation of Israel once containing a link
under “History” that instead went to “Feces”. If such outrageous acts can be
displayed for the world to see, how easily can a user distort facts by mistake or for
their own amusement to everyone’s dismay?
A study done by Wiegas, Wattenberg, and Dave for IBM brought light to the
misconceptions of the effects of vandalism. Wikipedia allows users to see all past
edits, so that if someone wanted they could access the history of page’s falsities or
vandalism in comparison to the corrected quality page. For obscene or clearly
vandalized material, the median time was 1.7 minutes. For mass deletions where
over to 90% of the page required deletion, the median time was 2.8 minutes. Full
page deletions took a median time of 90.4 minutes. The mean (average) times were
much greater, such as 1.8 days for obscene edits, although this was explained
because of the wealth of unpopular, rarely facilitated Wikipedia sites. The most
visited and most relevant sites were edited promptly, for example the page for
Abortion, that experience edits on average of twice a minute. (Wiegas, Wattenberg,
and Dave, p. 575-580)
Foreign nations do not always share our enthusiasm for Wikipedia. On June
2nd 2004 the People’s Republic of China had Wikipedia blocked to all Chinese IP
addresses. In all irony, this ban took place on the 15th Anniversary of the Tiananmen
Square Protests, symbolically reminding us of the suppression of democratic
knowledge. A 2008 New York Times article announced a cease on this ban following
meetings between Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and Cai Mingzhao. However,
while China now allows Chinese and English Wikipedia pages to be accessed from IP
addresses in China, they continue to block certain sites, such as Tiananmen Square
Protests and such pro-democracy movements and the Falun Gong religious
movement. This remains a rallying point of Wikipedia enthusiasts who support
Wikipedia as the symbol of free speech, democratic action, and the free pursuit of
knowledge. (NY Times, 2006)
The Optimism of Educators Towards Wikipedia
In his own analysis, Roy Rosenzweig discussed Wikipedia with its
implications on the studies of history. As a professor of history, he made several
claims that the core elements of Wikipedia are symbolic of the process of historical
debate itself. We often do not know the validity of historical sources; much of our
history is written in narrative form rather than factual form. In his call to fellow
pessimistic historians, he claims, “although Wikipedia as a product is problematic as
a sole source of information, the process of creating Wikipedia fosters an
appreciation of the very skills that historians try to teach.” He calls it a “great
democratic triumph” because it is designed to educate the masses. “Why are so
many of our scholarly journals locked away behind subscription gates? What about
American National Biography Online—written by professional historians, sponsored
by our scholarly societies, and supported by millions of dollars in foundation and
government grants… its impact is much smaller because it is available to so few
people.”
Rosen Zweig also saw a benefit to the “Ways of Wikipedia” in enriching
history with debate. He calls it “anecdotal and colorful” because it is free from the
academic processes of strict adherence to facts. Because they is submitted by
volunteers who have a genuine interest in the subject, Wikipedia pages often will
bring up surprising, amusing, or curious details that are omitted from most surveytype books. He uses the examples of Abraham Lincoln’s page, where five times as
much is written about his assassination than in the American National Biography.
Other facts, such as his sharing a birthday with Charles Darwin, his edict making
Thanksgiving a holiday, his nicknames (such as the Railsplitter) or the fact that his
family line ended in 1985 can excite the reader in ways most encyclopedias omit.
(2006)
For another field of study’s perspective, we can look to Schweitzer’s
Wikipedia and Psychology. In this study, Schweitzer conducted a personal
investigation on Wikipedia by studying how much tested content was on the site
and by polling his own students on its use. Even though it was conducted in 2007
when Wikipedia was half of the size it is now, Schweitzer found that 80% of the facts
and terms on his own final was on Wikipedia and that 63.8% of his students used
Wikipedia on a regular basis. “It would be impossible for a printed textbook [or even
a manageable series of them] to contain the breadth and depth of coverage found on
Wikipedia.” Schweitzer himself has come to use various Wikibooks to teach his
psychology students. Many of these Wikibooks contain information from Wikipedia
but have the information arranged in a consolidated textbook like fashion without
the ridiculous costs of printed textbooks.
In his book “Blogs, Wikis, and Other Powerful Web Tools for the Classroom”,
Will Richardson promoted the use of editing Wiki pages as part of a project for all
students. He suggests Wikispace as a way to create a website for a class to
collaborate on. Wikispaces can be easily designed to allow for members of a class to
have a Wiki account and to then collaborate together on a website to display, track,
and assess learning. Alongside Wikispaces, he described the benefits of using
Wikipedia as an output for research projects. “Giving students editorial control can
imbue in them a sense of responsibility and ownership for the site and minimize the
risk of someone adding something offensive. In fact, Wiki projects in schools have
worked best when the teachers loosen the reins a bit and let students manage the
content on the site.” (p. 65)
There are, indeed, much deeper trends in education that Wikipedia unearths.
Wikipedia has given a rebirth to an early educational theory based around Socrates.
The Socratic Teaching method involves inquiry and debate between opposing views
as a way to stimulate thinking, form new ideas, and in essence to educate. (Guess
where I got this information?...) This Socratic method has since been oppressed by
the system that we are educated in today, the Didactic Method of direct instruction
from a single all-knowing facilitator, like a teacher. In his discussion of Postmodern
Knowledge, Jean-Francois Lyotard described “narrative” knowledge as the future of
progressive thought. “Knowledge is not the same as science,” (p. 18) He saw the
Enlightenment and such other historical movements as the birth of “science”. This, I
described as “crystal” knowledge, which is an outcome of the Didactic Teaching
Method; a student of these movements became obsessed with memorization of
facts, dates, equations, and such. However, Wikipedia is perhaps a return of the
Socratic Method and the forefront of progressive education. What Wikipedia
promotes is the “narrative” knowledge that Lyotard promoted. This I call “fluid”
knowledge; it is based on creativity, imagination, and collaboration.
How does Wikipedia promote “fluid” knowledge and progressive thought? In
her essay on Typology of Mass Collaboration, JaeKyung Ha described that Wikipedia
is based on cooperation. The use of community without an all-knowing facilitator to
educate promotes every learner to have independent thought, or, “fluid” knowledge.
JaeKyung Ha explains mass collaboration through the lens of public good; “[What
Wikipedia produces are] non-tangible knowledge/information goods. Just as public
goods are, they are non-rival, non-exclusive, and non-transparent.” (p. 7) It is a
public service to volunteer and contribute positively towards Wikipedia. It allows
educators to expand their classroom to the corners of the globe and for nonteachers to be educators in their own fashion. Wikipedia makes “crystal” knowledge
more accessible and “fluid” knowledge more in-depth.
This is the heart of Wikipedia and other mass collaboration tools: the social
construction of knowledge. In their investigation of Ambiguity of Modern
Knowledge, authors Matei, Dobrescu, and Hooker used Mass Collaboration as a
symbol of the times when education itself is a social construct. These authors
compare the Wikipedian construction of knowledge to the theories of Charles
Darwin of biological evolution through natural selection, where the fittest rise and
the rest fall. “If enough ideas and opinions are given a chance to compete with each
other, they believe, the weak and false will sink, while the true and valid will
emerge, just like in nature the weak and slow species make way for the strong and
the fast.” (p. 10) This belief promotes the little control that Wikipedia enacts on its
editors. With time, it will evolve as the social construction of the “fittest” knowledge.
An Economy of Wikipedia
As a social construction tool, Wikipedia acts as its own little economy. Users
contribute the knowledge that they have, while benefitting from the wealth that
others share. Peer production is the work that Wikipedia is selling, and so far it
seems to
Hoaxes and Inaccuracies
“If Wikipedia says it, it must be true.” This statement has echoed throughout
the boundless walls of the Internet, especially on the social networking site
Facebook, where a group by the same name has, as of November 2009, reached over
155,000 members. (3) However, many incidents in recent years have shown that
this is not always the case. The open-editing model used by Wikipedia is inviting to
hoaxes, trolls, vandals, and even the truthiness of Stephen Colbert.
One of the most publicized cases of misconduct on Wikipedia is now known
as the Seigenthaler Incident. (4) In May 2005, John Seigenthaler of USA Today
discovered his biography on Wikipedia to have been tampered with. In the entry,
the political editor was, “thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy
assassinations of both John, and his brother Bobby. Nothing was ever proven.” (5)
This edit existed on Wikipedia for four months before Seigenthaler detected it.
(Wiki-Wikipedia) He conversed with Jimmy Wales, asking him how to track down
the unregistered users that make edits. Wales admitted there was no system to find
out names of individuals behind each unregistered edit. (Wiki) Seigenthaler
attempted to track down the individual himself, but was halted by Internet privacy
laws.
However, Seigenthaler was not as crafty as Wikipedia critic Daniel Brandt.
Brandt was able to use IP addresses as well as information provided by Seigenthaler
to discover the Nashville-based delivery company Internet connection that the
changes were made from. Unknown to both Seigenthaler and Wales, an employee at
the company mistook Wikipedia for a, “’gag’ website, and that he had written the
tale to shock a co-worker.” (NYT) While Brian Chase, the author of the falsified
statements, may have found his work to be humorous, Seigenthaler thought it was
“Internet character assassination.” (Wikinomics)
While not all attempts at vandalism are as publicized and notable as the
Seigenthaler Incident, Wikipedia does admit when things go wrong, and attempt to
change the site to allow greater accuracy and fewer vandals. Following the
Seigenthaler Incident, Wikipedia started to change their editing policies.
Unregistered users are no longer allowed to develop new articles and the changes to
articles are tracked more closely.
However, sometimes even registered users can cause problems. Stephen
Colbert, host of Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report,” has been known to haunt
the Wikipedia domain. Om July 31st, 2006, Colbert aired a segment on what he
referred to as Wikiality. In the segment, Colbert supposedly logged onto Wikipedia,
and began to demonstrate how easy it is to change articles at a moment’s notice.
While the viewers could not see the screen, it was implied that Colbert was actually
typing away changes to the Colbert Report article. The first change he made was to
the section titled Recurring Topics. Colbert went on to say that while the section
claimed he had accused Oregon of being California’s equivalent of Canada, et cetera,
he had actually changed his mind about Oregon. After some typing on the screen, he
announced that, “Oregon is Idaho’s Portugal.” Colbert did not stop there. He also
claimed to have edited the article on George Washington to say that the president
did not have slaves. He also invited his audience to go and find articles on elephants,
and to alter them to state that the population of elephants had tripled in the year.
After the show aired, twenty articles regarding elephants were vandalized to say
that their populations had tripled.
It is not known if Stephen Colbert actually edited the articles. While the two
articles about the Colbert Report and George Washington were actually edited by a
user Stephencolbert, no ties have been made to the Comedy Central program. Going
back in the changes log, though, one will find that the edits were made the same
time that the Colbert Report tapes for the nightly show, leading most viewers to
believe that yes, Colbert, or one of his staff, actually registered the accounts. The day
following the incident, Tawker, a Wikipedia user/editor, blocked the username
“Stephencolbert”. However, Wikipedia claims that the block was placed not because
of the vandalism, but because Wikipedia has a policy of not allowing usernames to
be modeled after names of celebrities, unless the celebrity is the one that created
the account. To reinstate the account, if it is indeed his, Colbert and Comedy Central
would have to prove that one of their representatives created it.
Tawker is just one of the many volunteers that edit and help manage the
encyclopedia giant. Wikipedia only has five paid staffers, and somehow still
manages to be just as accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica. (Wikinomics)
Volunteers do the daily tasks that the staffers cannot cover, like tracking changes to
articles, making sure photos are copyright-free, and covering up the mistakes of
trolls and vandals on the site. Founder Jimmy Wales estimates that despite the
growing number of registered users, one percent of all editors make fifty percent of
the edits. (Wikinomics)
Pessimism of Educators
Although much of his investigation promotes the use of Wikipedia, Roy
Rosenzweig’s article reminds us of some major deficiencies of Wikipedia in the
study of history. While “verifiability” is a focus of must Wikipedians, very few have
the historical professionalism to discuss historical significance beyond the verified
facts. He states, “professional historians might find an account accurate and fair but
trivial; that is what some see as the difference between history and antiquarianism.
Thus, the conflict between professionals and amateurs is not necessarily a simple
one over whether people are doing good or bad history but a more complex (and
more interesting) conflict about what kind of history is being done.” (June 2006)
Conclusion: The Duty of Educators
A conjecture by Matei, Dobrescu, and Hooker attacks the basis of Wikipedia’s
neutrality as a failure for social progress. They claim that because there is a lack of
opinion-based entries, it might “involve, rather than solve, conflicts.” (p. 5)
A point by Simon Waldman in his article on Wikipedia’s success reminds us
that Wikipedia should continue in its same path. “There are elements that make
[this anarchy] work. The first is its ownership, and lack of commercial imperative.
The site is manned by volunteers, and now owned by a foundation, which means
people willingly give their time and intellectual property to the venture. It manages
to run on less than $100,000 a year.” The lack of commercial imperative allows
Wikipedia to maintain its neutral point of view for subjects that are economically
sensitive. No companies fund Wikipedia; therefore, there are no points of view that
Wikipedia is forced to promote, unlike published books which are often influenced
by the opinions of publishers.
The truth is that Wikipedia is far from finished, but even now, flaws and all, it
is already one of the wonders of the digital age; and a pin-up for a growing
movement that sees the internet evolving as a true "citizens' medium".
In the end, there are more editors who have good and educated intentions
than those with wrong or uneducated intentions.
If students are going to use this source, than it is evident that students prefer
a democratic, collaborative process for their information. The rise of Wikipedia and
the fall of textbooks show the need of professionals to modernize and actually
contribute to these collaborative processes. A negative bias by educators causes all
academic study to reject Wikipedia, despite its growing popularity, rather than to
improve it and join the new process.