I have a friend who is particularly impressionable. Not having a great deal of general knowledge, she tends to believe most things she is told. We have a mutual friend, who plays up to this fact for his own amusement. He is particularly good at making her believe completely ridiculous notions are common-knowledge facts. And although he is always the instigator, I’ll admit that I have been partner-in-crime on occasion. Especially on the more ridiculous schemes.
One morning I got a phone call from him. Warning me that she was going to call me soon, to get me to confirm that “bears are asexual,” because, understandably, she didn’t quite believe that it was the truth. Two minutes later, I got the call. I explained earnestly that it was one of those strange facts, similar to platypuses being one of the few mammals that lay eggs. I could tell that she was not entirely convinced, and suggested that she search Wikipedia to confirm. All the while, I was editing the entry on bears to suit our purpose.
The Wikipedia entry about bears is partially security protected, or ‘semi-protected.’ What this means is that anonymous users are not able to make edits; only users with autoconfirmed accounts can make edits. The safeguard here is to ensure that only users who have proven themselves trusted editors can make changes to ‘important’ pages. These ideas reflect prominent ones in academic argument on the validity of Wikipedia as an information source.
Wikipedia is a socially constructed information source. It is created by members of the general public, and the idea of collective intelligence is prominent. “None of us know everything, all of us know something.” Together, the pool of knowledge that a collective number of people can create is theoretically far larger than that which any one person could do individually.
The problem, as debated worldwide by academics in the field, stands with the fact that Wikipedia is open source; it has been compared more closely to open source software than peer production or a learning community. Academic Timme Bisgaard Munk discusses that different motivations drive the desire to contribute to such a forum, including ‘achieving status, being part of a community, pursuit of political agendas, and developing and displaying an online identity.’
These motivations perfectly outline both the good and bad points about Wikipedia:
1) Achieving status/being part of a community- Academic Hichang Cho discusses that motivations for working within Wikipedia include intrinsic rewards, rather than extrinsic ones, as well as relational an social factors such as reciprocal obligations, community membership and the role of social networks and social capital drive the creation of quality entries.
2) Collective intelligence- Academic Thanomwong Poorisat discusses the lack of gatekeepers, and the pitfalls implied if the community evaluation process, or the knowledge of those conducting it, is flawed. He also discusses flaws in perceived credibility, due to a certain amount of anonymity of users.
So while it is true to say that, through collective intelligence, a greater sphere of knowledge can be created and shared, the issue of credibility is a major one. The concept of agenda of the individual user needs to be taken seriously into account. Too often, information presented on forums such as Wikipedia, is taken at face-value. That’s not to say, however, that I believe it to be a useless tool. But it should be taken more as a starting-point for further research, than a complete guide to anything and everything.
NB: The single sentence I added to the ‘Bear’ entry was removed, very soon after, by myself.
