Wed 24 Sep 2008
How reliable is Wikipedia? Short answer is… not very. At any point in time, someone could have vandalized the page to serve their own biased agenda — the fact that it may get revert moments later doesn’t change the underlying reality that for any given page load the data should be considered unreliable.
However, despite its unreliability I tend to rely on it quite a bit when I’m trying to understand or learn about a new topic. And I’m told by friends that they treat Wikipedia the same way. Why do we trust and rely on an information source that we know we can’t really rely on or trust?
What occurred to me the other day was that in my head I treat information procured from Wikipedia with the same reliability category that I place non-expert secondhand source information in. If a friend or associate would tell me that the King of Belgium has six fingers, I’ll pretty much believe that. That is to say, since it’s not super important information I’ll just assume that this is true — but if I encounter a Belgian who insists that Belgium doesn’t even have a King I will happily disregard the former knowledge without much hesistation.
I think this is why Wikipedia actually works for most people, despite its unreliability. It works in a way that we are familliar with because we are already quite used to holding information in our heads with various states of trust.
September 24th, 2008 at 2:46pm
You know, I had no idea how hard it would be to avoid editing Wikipedia to include a six-fingered king after reading this post. So far, I haven’t even loaded the page, but my willpower is much stronger than it used to be.
You’re right about use though. If I want the general overview of a topic, Wikipedia is great. If I want more detailed/trusted information, I can still get some from Wikipedia, providing I’m willing to look at the edit history and editors of the page, and am willing to validate that information with another source - but even that only goes so far and is more research-oriented than my typical casual Wikipedia browsing habits.
It does seem like most reasonable people intrinsically know where to draw the line with information trust, but I think my perspective (and possibly yours) may be skewed because of our professions and social circles.
September 24th, 2008 at 2:54pm
Good point — but with these people (let’s politely call them more trusting) — I would propose that they are both more likely to put higher trust in secondhand information just like they are likely to be more trusting of Wikipedia.
It’s the same case, they treat wikipedia as a source of secondhand information, even though overall they are too trusting of unreliable information in general.
September 24th, 2008 at 3:08pm
I concur.
September 25th, 2008 at 5:13am
I think wikipedia would benefit strongly from a ‘volatility’ meter for each page, perhaps in the upper right corner. Effectively, it would be a little graphic that conveyed just how much, and how frequently a page had been altered.
Conversely, what would be really interesting, would be some trick in the css for the page which would allow the reader, if they flicked the ‘on’ switch, to see the recent edits highlighted, or colour coded by editing date.
That way, when I add the fact that Sarah Palin has 6 fingers on her left hand, the King of Belgium can know that it was a recent addition, and thus subject to more doubt.
September 25th, 2008 at 8:39am
Get the facts!
Sarah Palin has six babies on one hand - and a platter of “Mommy’s Earth shaped pancakes” in the other.
September 25th, 2008 at 10:44am
Johen: indeed, that would really help for the problem of vandalism which is the case I was talking about. But still, even if they could show that the page hadn’t been vandalized… would you still trust it as an expert source?
September 29th, 2008 at 6:54pm
I do not trust wikipedia. This is because I do not trust wikipedians. The fundamental problem with “common knowledge” is that the commoner is a moron, and his collective knowledge is, strangely, even more stupid, and reduced in its breadth and scope, by the additional morons. I therefore posit that moronitude is multiplicative, rather than additive, and offer Wikipedia as my proof.