Greg Mayer, who posts here from time to time, has been working for several years on a post called “What’s the matter with Wikipedia?”. I see the drafts on the site’s dashboard, and occasionally he updates them a bit. But I fear that his post, which claims that the online encyclopedia is full of errors, will never see the light of day—meeting the same fate (nonpublication and obscurity) as Casaubon’s “Key To All Mythologies” in Middlemarch.
In the meantime, though, a new paper in PLoS ONE by Adam Wilson and Gene Likens (reference and free download are below) examined how often Wikipedia entries on scientific topics are edited. In case you didn’t know, each Wikipedia entry has tabs at the top (“history”) that give a record when and what changes are made, and there’s often a “talk page” (tab at top left) in which editors discuss and argue with each other about what to say.
Most Wikipedia entries are pretty tame, with not many alterations being contested, deleted, or altered. But on topics that incite controversy, the talk can become quite energetic—and contentious. Wilson and Likens set out to see if Wikipedia articles dealing with controversial scientific topics were edited more often than were relatively noncontroversial ones. They put three area in the former category: acid rain, global warming, and evolution, and chose four “control” articles—continental drift, heliocentrism, general relativity, and standard model (the standard model of particle physics).
Here’s an anecdote offered by Wilson and Likens to show how acrimonious (and stupid) the Wikipedia “edit wars” can get:
Following a long-standing research interest and expertise in acid rain, we noticed that some corrections we or others made on the acid rain article had been changed by major edits to introduce (or re-introduce) balderdash and factual errors into the content. An illustrative example of tempestuous edits to the English language Wikipedia acid rain entry begins on November 30, 2011. At 10:20am, an anonymous editor (identified only by an IP address), removed the introductory paragraph which defined acid rain and replaced it with a statement calling acid rain “a load of bullshit.” This change was quickly reverted, but the next day the paragraph was again deleted and replaced by “Acid rain is a popular term referring to the deposition of wet poo and cats.” Five minutes later this edit was reverted and repeated again, and then reverted again. The following day (December 2, 2011) another sentence was changed from “During the 1990s, research continued.” to “During the 1990s, research on elfs continued [emphasis added],” which remained for over seven hours. Later that day the sentence “AciD Rain [sic] killed bugs bunny” was briefly added. Fifteen minutes later the section title “Chemis- try in cloud droplets” was changed to “Blowjobs.”
At any rate, the authors downloaded the edit history of each of the seven topics between 2003 and 2012. The edit data are below:
Statistical analysis showed that each of the three “controversial” topics was edited significantly more often than was each nonontroversial topic. Further, the two groups differeed significantly from each other in both rate of editing and size of edits made.
This is not surprising given the fact that evolution, acid rain, and global warming are all contested by faith-based denialists (by “faith” I mean more than “religious faith”), who want their viewpoints represented. After all, Wikipedia is, as the authors note, the sixth most popular website in the world.
Their conclusions? First, that Wikipedia should flag controversial topics and perhaps find a way to rank the reputation of editors. That’s not likely to work, though. Their other conclusion—identical to the one reached by Greg, which should be clear IF he ever publishes his piece—is that we should take Wikipedia articles with a grain of salt, and avoid using them as primary sources. I do agree (I’ve often wanted to vet the “Evolution” entry for accuracy), though I often use Wikipedia myself to look up facts about different species or topics, and if something seems weird I’ll look at the references.
In general, though, I disagree with Greg that Wikipedia is best avoided completely for most purposes. After all, it does have footnotes, and you can consult those to find more-primary sources. But for issues like climate change, given the above fracas it may be judicious to follow Wilson and Likens’s advice:
Users should be aware that content in Wikipedia can be extremely dynamic; two students could obtain, within seconds, diametrically different information on a controversial scientific topic. Educators should ensure that students understand the limitations and appropriate uses of Wikipedia, especially for controversial scientific issues.
My added advice: check the references.
h/t: Cindy
___________
Wilson, A. M. and G. E. Likens. 2015. Content volatility of scientific topics in Wikipedia: a cautionary tale. PLoS ONE, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0134454
I had no idea that acid rain was considered controversial and was contested by denialists. Odd.
Those people should talk to the average swedish tax payer, who currently puts out for calcifying half our 10 000 lakes to support having a fish controlled instead of arthropod controlled lake ecology. It isn’t only a fact, it is an expensive one.
I though once that it would be a nice idea to push the bill over to UK where most of the stuff we get is produced. But it seems other times the source is the continent. And of course our own industries can’t throw the first stone either.
“Calcifying” is shorthand for pH control and buffering, of course. I think the best method are somewhat pulverized basic rocks, but I’m not sure. (It is an entire industry by now, with a lot of inventions making it cheaper and less work intensive. Still…)
Likewise.
Yeah, I didn’t know it was controversial either.
At one stage my mother insisted some of her roses had been killed by acid rain after one of Mt Ruapehu’s eruptions.
It took me some weeks to convince her that it wasn’t acid rain because the rest of her garden was fine, and she must have sprayed them with Roundup by accident (which she had).
(From wikipedia)
Roundup … glyphoste …”Other names 2-[(phosphonomethyl)amino]acetic acid”
and indeed, if you look at the structural formula, there is indeed a carboxylic acid group on one end of the molecule.
Your mum was right – acid rain killed her roses.
Would it not be possible to assign an expert in each area to review proposed changes? He wouldn’t have to contest controversial edits, just add comments to show the appropriate balance. This would alert the reader to areas which need further investigation before swallowing hook, line, and sinker.
‘balance’ is a worrying word in this context as it can sometimes be taken to mean both sides of an argument must get equal exposure. In an encyclopedia discussion on evolution, for example, it may be appropriate to refer to creationism in the context of cultural attitudes to the theory of evolution but would be entirely inappropriate to put creationist arguments alongside evolutionary arguments as alternatives of equal standing. I am sure that is not what you meant but it is what sometimes ends up happening where a broadcaster or publisher is expected to be neutral and non partisan – for example occasionally in BBC coverage of global warming stories on current affairs programmes.
We went through that with Nupedia while Jimmy Wales was trying to get Wikipedia off the ground. Wikipedia’s model won, fair and square. See the Wikipedia page on Nupedia. There is no corresponding page as Nupedia doesn’t exist any more.
Wikipedia does block anonymous editing of any controversial biography of a living person (they call that a BLP) in order to avoid lawsuits related to slander.
Since acid rain is not a person, WP admins are a bit less sensitive here, since acid rain or the victims thereof aren’t in a position to file a lawsuit.
Look at the bios of either Barack Obama or Sarah Palin and you will see a padlock symbol on the upper right. (in the Obama article it is between the star symbol -an award for distinguished editing- and the electronic speaker logo–indicating you can listen to the article).
The padlock indicates the article has “protected” status, so that only editors with an established track record can edit the article.
Occasionally other articles that are the subject of very high rates of vandalism get protected for a while. In 2011 when the movie “Anonymous” came out, which buys the theory that Edward DeVere is the “real” author of Shakespeare’s plays, there was a rash of edits to WP promoting this theory. Many of the Shakespeare-related articles were locked down for several months as a consequence.
The Church of Scientology is the only organization of any kind on this planet that has had all the IP addresses assigned to it banned (in perpetuity) from editing Wikipedia.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Rough_guide_to_semi-protection
for a bit on their policies on locking down articles.
Now, is that a list worth trying to join?
I think the “Groucho” answer applies : “I refuse to be a member of any club that would accept me as a member.”
My own feeling is that on balance Wikipedia is a useful resource that much of the time it can be trusted. Areas where caution is required are fairly clear – and many of the changes made by non-objective editors tend to be rather obvious as in the example quoted. Of course, much depends on what you want to use the information for. If the veracity of the information is critically important a higher degree of caution is justified.
I think Wikipedia is pretty reliable regarding global warming despite the fact that at any moment, a denier may insert garbage into an article. But, as Jerry points out, it’s easy to go to the primary sources.
On a somewhat related note, I was having a back and forth recently with a global warming denier who didn’t really show his hand until he played the “global warming is a religion” card and brought up the investigation of the IPCC report from 2001. Of course, the main person driving that investigation was Senator Inhofe, none other than the man who cites Genesis 8:22 as the reason AGW absolutely cannot be true. This also backs Jerry’s assertion in FvF that a large portion of global warming denial is indeed driven by faith.
Yes, I use Wikipedia to find primary sources and often a well footnoted document is pretty good.
Are you citing primary sources about your own attractiveness on dating sites? 😛
It’s been well-established that 95% of people are much better looking than average, which is perfectly reasonable so long as the other 5% are many orders of magnitude worse looking than average.
Not only that, but 95% of people have an above-average number of limbs….
b&
Damn, you stole my statistic! But it’s actually more like 99.9%…
cr
Well, in that spirit…Baihu has three legs.
Oh, don’t worry. He also has the usual fourth leg. But it is also, therefore, of necessity, true that he has three legs.
And so it’s also true that 95% of people have an above-average number of limbs, even if it’s also also also true that 99.9% do….
b&
Well that is true, but it’s splitting a different hair from the one I was splitting 😉
Of course my number was a wild guess (just like yours?) but I’ll bet not more than 1 in 1000 people is short of a limb or two.
(The ‘average’ person, of course, has 3.999998 limbs or some such number)
Re-reading the thread, I see your 95% was chosen to mirror chrisbuckley80’s statistic on beauty. I don’t think I can afford to split any more hairs or I’ll lose my place in the 95%…
cr
Well, now that we’ve gone down this path, if I can say I have 2 legs but also be correct in saying I have 1 leg, the only sensible conclusion is that I can also rightly say I have no legs!
No, by simple logic, that ‘no legs’ specifically precludes having any legs.
🙂
In that context note that ‘having only one leg’ is different from ‘having one (particular) leg (which may be one of many)
cr
You atheists are so strident with your insistence on calling out implicit assumptions and demanding precise definitions! How is anyone supposed to use convoluted statistics and ambiguous references if you insist on calling them out?
I use it too. The vast, vast majority of entries are not controversial. They seem mostly written by folks who love the subject. The few items corrupted by pricks must be kept under scrutiny, but mostly its just about how much of the mass of the solar system is composed of planets. Or, whatever.
I’m not worried about the kind of silly vandalism described in the acid rain anecdote. Those kinds of edits happen all the time, but they rarely last more than an hour on a popular page.
What’s much more dangerous is when a group of people band together (often coordinating outside Wikipedia) to push a particular agenda, one that’s not obviously wrong to a casual reader. If they can manage to outnumber whatever editors are already there, which isn’t hard to do when a page is quiescent and editors aren’t looking closely, then they can form a majority consensus and overrule any opposing views. This doesn’t really happen on established and well-known science pages like Evolution, but it happens frequently on pages with any kind of identity politics angle, where there’s no objective way to decide who’s right, so whoever can muster a bigger posse wins.
Spot on. I also sometimes use it as a starting off point. I have a friend who edits a fair bit on Wikipedia & he has encouraged me to edit a few pages – only minor additions & a couple of references. There are plenty of gaps where the submitted information is poor or controversial & there are few references – but still, as you say, it can be a big help when ‘the internet’ is such a big jungle. We should be more careful about giving students & school pupils the skills to discriminate between crap & sound evidence.
PS Poor Greg! He is probably getting excited by this latest frog discovery –
https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/science-ticker/another-tiny-frog-species-found-sky-islands-brazil?tgt=more
According to Wikipedia, Wikipedia is reliable (comparable to Encyclopedia Britannica). But this is a statistical evaluation; and you can never be sure that a particular article’s accuracy is good. Checking the footnotes (do they say what they’re supposed to say?) and glancing at the talk page (to gauge controversy or edit wars) are good practices.
Yeah I’m with the moderate crowd on this one. Use it to find references to primary sources, then use them. Or use WP when you’re looking for info that is low-priority, low-regret. Like…including a statistic in a comment post. :).
The only thing I’d add would be: always cite your source. If you looked something up on Wikipedia, say that. Your readers can then decide for themselves how much to trust it.
“Ditto.”
Many many moons ago I spent a few days trying to clean up the article on the historicity of Jesus. When I first spotted it, it read like something straight out of Catholic apologetics. A few edits and edit wars and the like later, I gave up.
Just for shits and giggles, I just now pulled it up. Still reads like Catholic apologetics.
Wikipedia is good for identifying where popular consensus lies. How well that consensus aligns with reality is another matter entirely.
b&
There have been some reviews of philosophy articles on Wikipedia too. Middling, IIRC, but that was several years ago. My general experience is that they are very superficial and amateurish, but not terribly wrongheaded – usually.
I think this is one of those rhetorical headlines where the answer is always “no.” Actually, it would be interesting to see where traditional encyclopedias come down on questions like evolution and global warming.
That is interesting, considering that Wikipedia has as good quality as the quality encyclopedias. That must mean that most articles are better, but that some are “war torn”.
I don’t see the point of writing an article criticizing general use of Wikipedia. It is not a primary source, but it is used in papers and classes for what it is. (A trite, somewhat up to date, referenced, overview.) If it is so used, it is likely because it works better than the alternatives.
Any controversial topic on Wikipedia is unreliable.
They don’t do a good enough job of keeping ideologues out of power there, and in this case most of those ideologues are in the authoritarian left.
Examples?
If you don’t like it, get in there and correct it.
That’s an epic came of whackamole right there….
b&
Check out articles like this –
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel_guitar
and all the links off it, and then tell me it isn’t worth the effort. 🙂
cr
I like it as an entry point. There are often serious errors even in peer-reviewed journal articles, so no matter what the source, one should read with care!
I’ve found Wikipedia useful for finding sources when Google-fu came up lacking and my school’s online library had handful of barely relevant papers before the search dived completely off topic.
And speaking of off topic, Orson has finally discovered a box. He’s a bag cat despite my offering him many different boxes to try out, so this is amazing. I should take some photos for you to enjoy.
Relying in part on the Mr. Casaubon sub-plot, some classify Middlemarch as the original work of metafiction. (Others date the dawn of metafiction even earlier, to Tristam Shandy or Don Quixote, and still others, even earlier to — who knows? — maybe Sumerian cuneiform.) In any event, Middlemarch ranks as the first work both of proto-feminist metafiction and of feminist proto-metafiction.
The edits cited by the authors were all short, silly, and quite obvious trolling (and easily reverted). As such, I’m not even sure they would have been made by any ‘serious’ acid rain denier. Far harder to counter would be the sort of edit that starts “Schnitzl and Trifl have shown in their paper ‘Blah blah blah’ that most effects attributed to acid rain are in fact due to over-application of fertilizer to fields… ” (with a string of dubious references). (I just made that up, btw).
I agree with Prof CC’s approach (rather than Gertg’s). I usually go to Wikipedia first – I’d suggest that, ON AVERAGE, it’s probably more reliable than [the first website linked from Google], which may often be a site dedicated to pushing a particular viewpoint. Wikipedia does at least have an established edit process. And if the Wikipedia article looks a bit ‘suss’, then is the time to check the references or do some more Googling.
Wikipedia is well worth consulting; while some articles are just ‘stubs’, it’s remarkable how well-written many articles on technical subjects are. For example, try (picked at random off the top of my head) the Wikipedia articles on Newtonian Telescopes, the Maxim gun, the Treaty of Versailles, rocket engines, PVC (polyvinyl chloride), locomotive valve gears…
cr
“Gertg’s” = “Greg’s” of course. Massive finger trouble. Sorry.
cr
I think that Wikipedia is useful and you can usually tell whether an article is reliable or not when you read it. If something is coherent, well-referenced and matches my (limited) knowledge of the topic, then I am usually happy to trust it as a useful intro to a topic. As with anything, going to original sources and checking the dates of those sources is critical if you are going to stake anything important (like your reputation) on it. This applies to textbooks written by “experts” too.
One thing we did on a course this year was get the undergrads to mock edit key topics on the subject in question (population genetics). (It was up to them if they wanted to actually edit Wikipedia after the assignment.) It really taught them both the strengths and limits of Wikipedia – and the importance of tracing information back to source.
Jerry notes that many Wikipedia articles have footnotes. In the articles I follow most closely, and edit from time to time, what I have found is that many of the footnotes are fudged. That is, as the references appear in the articles, the article text is not supported by the book or article cited in the footnote. Sometimes the article text says exactly the opposite of what the cited source source says. On topics such as human psychology and human genetics, it’s a good idea to be very wary indeed of Wikipedia. If you haven’t checked the source directly, you can’t be sure a cited source really supports the Wikipedia article text. And you can be very sure that Wikipedia articles on controversial topics willfully ignore many of the better sources on the topic, as those are often deleted in edit wars.
So far I’ve been able to fix one article by myself–mostly by editing it off-wiki for months and then dropping in the new text all at once–to bring it up to “good article” status, which means it was reviewed by someone else and found to meet certain mostly copy-editing-related criteria. With a few other editors, I’ve brought the article “English language” (a very frequently viewed article) up to good article status, but that article still has a long way to go to get up to “featured article” status. As a first rule of thumb for reading Wikipedia, assume that an article that hasn’t even reached “good article” status, which is the great majority of articles on Wikipedia, may wholly misrepresent the sources and show a massively unbalanced view of the article topic. I’ll keep slogging away in trying to improve Wikipedia. One of the articles I work on is one of the ten most edit-warred articles on all of Wikipedia, which has been in bad shape for years.
Another big issue on Wikipedia is the sheer convenience of using online rather than dead-tree sources, so that almost all Wikipedia articles rely on sources (even when those sources are correctly and honestly used) little better than what you can find for yourself by using Google Scholar. Wikipedia still needs a lot more editors who know how to use a library. As anyone who regularly uses an academic library knows, there is still a lot of good, current scholarship that reviews the prior literature (the best kind of source for Wikipedia) that isn’t available as free, full text online.
I remember a HUGE controversy on Wikipedia on wether a certain tower in Vienna was an observation, or an observation and TV tower (because, though not used as a TV tower, it was build after a plan for one). Seriously:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donauturm#Wikipedia_naming_controversy
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