I was looking for a usable definition of “mass media” today. This wasn’t it:
Media (the plural of “medium”) its when people blow things out of proportion like when people blame tom brady for losing games but if peyton manig loses its alwasys some one eleses fault either the wide recievers, the offensive line,or the defens it is really wrong and should be fixed (Please see data for a similar example.)
Heh.
Please share widely!
that’s a fair point about Peyton Manning…
I looked at the article, and was going to fix that portion you quoted, but I was too slow – while I was looking at the article history, somebody else reverted the change, labelling it “vandalism”. It looks like this bit of vandalism survived for almost five hours, which is much longer than usual.
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You demonstrated one of the drawbacks of Wikipedia, but it’s not the one you seem to think you’re showing. Vandalism gets fixed very quickly – that’s one of the strengths of Wikipedia.
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No, the drawback you demonstrated is that because of its name (suggesting an encyclopedia), and the way most of the rest of the web works, people tend to think of wikipedia in terms of static entries, rather than the ongoing process it actually is. Those of us who frequently participate in editing wikipedia don’t do so as much, but we’re a minority.
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When you link to a wikipedia article to give people a source for general background about a topic or word you don’t want to go into explaining, that’s a good use of wikipedia. That’s what it’s meant for.
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But when you link to a wikipedia article in order to refer to a specific bit of idiosyncratic text, or to cite it as a source for a particular fact, you’re misusing wikipedia. Because it is ephemeral, a work in progress, an ongoing debate and collaborative work that is constantly changing. You just saw a snapshot in time. You can be very confident that most future snapshots of the same article will give as good, or better, of an overall treatment of the word/concept as what you just saw, you cannot assume that anyone visiting that article in the future will see any specific phrase or sentence or link or fact that you think you’re citing.
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So you just demonstrated how people commonly misuse Wikipedia. It’s a common misunderstanding and it makes a lot of sense that many people do it, so it does count as a “drawback” that could benefit from a fix. It just isn’t what I think you intended to joke about.
Geez, I just thought it was funny.
I blame Reche Caldwell. The only thing that can get blown out of proportion with him are his eyes after he realizes he dropped a TD.
It sounds completely accurate to me!
..were told by their high school teachers that wickpedia would not be accepted as an information source for class assignments.
Unless it wouldn’t be accepted as the sole source.
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When we do online research in my class, we start at Wikipedia to get a feel for the lay of the land. I’ll take Wikipedia on most topics over a lot of the other junk on the Web.
Differently. While Wikipedia itself wasn’t allowed as a source, I found it great for finding other sources, because people would often cite at the bottom of the page. That was fair game, and usually good information.
Wikipedia is a good, quick jumping off point and may lead to good scholarly sources, but should never be cited in an academic paper.
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It is better they learn this before they get to college. I do not have one professor that will accept Wikipedia in the works cited.
While Wikipedia does strive for a neutral point of view (an NPOV in their parlance), that cannot always be attained. An article, say on the Sorb minority in Germany and its territory, Lusatia, might be of keen interest to Sorbs but to few others. If there are not enough scholars to weigh in, it’s easy for imbalance to take over.
I think what those teachers actually said, more specifically, was that you can’t cite Wikipedia as a source. Using Wikipedia an “information source” is a great thing to do for class assignments, and it’s something teachers should encourage. If those teachers actually said not to do that, I think they’re misserving their students (they can’t “accept” it, because they don’t really know what information sources students used).
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But I doubt they actually said that. I think they specifically prohibited citing Wikipedia. That’s because it’s not designed to be cited, for the reasons I explained in my earlier comment. If you cite Wikipedia for something, you may discover that, as with David’s post here, when people go to Wikipedia looking for the thing you claim was there, it’s not there anymore.
Citing and using online sources presents a new challenge. You no longer can rely on a librarian to filter the crackpot stuff for you — you have to do it yourself.
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There is a growing bias against Wiki because people can change it (the horror!) which makes it like any other website and book. I think people believe that the “truth” is unchanging, so if a source is changing, it must be inherently untrue. So seeing things change on Wiki is seen as alarming, whereas slyly moving things around in a new edition, or publishing a correction nobody sees, sweeps mistakes under the rug.
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This confuses accuracy with precision and efficiency. Most of the changes that come to Wiki are to get to the truth in a more direct and clear way, not to implement an agenda. Frankly, somebody would write a better report on the latest escalation of American troops in Iraq if they used the Wikipedia entry which is well-balanced (at least at the moment), then if they relied on stuff from the White House, Regnery Publishing, Bob Woodward, and the CATO Institute (all nicely paper sources).
Online versions of newspapers, magazines, journals, etc are just as valid for research and citations as the print versions.
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But you do make a valid point, how does a young scholar determine the difference between the Nature international weekly journal of science and the Institute for Creation Research?
According to a limited study by Nature. I think it should be used like any encyclopedia in the classroom: a worthy source for some kinds of points, not suitable for others. Simply to ban it — pretend it does not exist for purposes of class discussion — is idiotic. The encyclopedists, Diderot etal, contributed, and continue to contribute, a lot to our knowledge. One can hear many resonances of the current outcry against Wikipedia in the objections to the Encyclopedie as described in the entry on Diderot in Wikipedia:
The Atlantic had an introductory article on Wiki a couple months ago. It had the tone of a sniffing displeasure of the site, but no real evidence to back it up (the fact that is was presented as something new says a lot, too).
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Plus, the timeliness is useful. Most of the encyclopedias in my school have no mention of East Timor or Eritrea; many of them have nothing on independent Estonia. What is more accurate: some errors in a Wiki page on Eritrea, or an encyclopedia article that describes Eritrea in a region with northeast Ethiopia?
Well it seems Stephen Colbert got himself into a “sticky Wiki” a while back. He got banned for trying to get his minions to edit the elephant population numbers to show it tripled in six months. He got caught pretty quickly. The site is monitored and he got locked out.
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But I love his new word: Wikiality:
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But more to the point of this post:
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The Brownsville Herald reports:
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I like Wikipedia. For some reason it pops up as a top Google search link more often than it used to. I take it with a grain of salt, however, and would never rely on it solely as a source of fact.