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

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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