Wikipedia Changed Over Time and So Has Its Critics

Wikipedia, and concerns over its reliability and accuracy, have been discussed on this blog before. It was also a common mantra among my teachers in public school to warn about the dangers of Wikipedia, because, as they said, anyone can go on there and write anything they want. As my fellow blogger and Pfister showed, however, editing Wikipedia was a much more complicated process than was often claimed. Still, I was curious as to how the perception of Wikipedia has changed over time and the results were rather interesting.

Being an online encyclopedia that is constantly updated and not subject to a single person’s control puts Wikipedia in a unique situation regarding its critics, because Wikipedia has an entry about itself. And since many articles are written by those who have no financial stake in the reputation of the website, Wikipedia’s own Wikipedia page does not shy away from common criticisms that have emerged concerning the site over the years.

The usual suspects are there, such as claims of inaccuracy and unreliability, and how educators often ban it from being cited in student’s papers. Other criticisms are present as well, ones that are not heard as often, such as privacy issues surrounding private citizens that have their own articles. There is also the way Wikipedia allows graphic and explicit content on its pages that could easily be accessed by children. Some of these criticisms could apply to the internet as a whole, and Wikipedia, being one of the world’s most famous websites, is simply a more prominent target.

Google and Wikipedia logos in person's hands

It should be noted that, regardless of what educators and other intellectuals thought of Wikipedia in its early days, it was always popular with the average person. If it wasn’t then it would not have evoked the kind of reaction it did in schools, nor would the site have become as popular as it did. But opinions of Wikipedia among the media have changed since it first went online. It was better received in the 2010s, throwing off the appeal to tradition some of its critics often relied on.

What surprised me the most when reading about this was how Facebook, Google, and YouTube now link to Wikipedia to help people decipher truth from falsehood. While these sites’ opinions of Wikipedia are hardly the be-all-end-all—and some of the criticisms listed above might still be valid—it is ironic to see the site that was once denounced as unreliable now held up as a standard of credibility. Maybe new forms of writing simply take time to be accepted.

Wikipedia: To Cite or Not To Cite

I can remember hearing countless time during my education, “make sure to cite your sources, but do not use Wikipedia as one of your sources.” I’m sure many of you have heard the same thing.

What makes Wikipedia a non-credible source to many? This might help explain why. But is it really that unreliable? Perhaps Wikipedia is more than we give it credit for.

Wikipedia Logo

Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia

Compared to other sources, Wikipedia offers multiperspectivalism. Many people, voluntarily, contribute and edit Wikipedia pages. While information added can be incorrect, it is constantly being edited; each page being fine tuned and expanded. Every contributor comes to Wikipedia with their own background, knowledge and perspective. That is what makes Wikipedia so diverse, expansive and collaborative.

In “Networked Expertise in the Era of Many-to-many Communication: On Wikipedia and Invention,” Pfister discusses the role multiperspectivalism plays for Wikipedia:

If the first way that many-to-many communication reshapes the relationship between invention and expertise is to reshuffle traditional attention routines, the second significant effect of these new communication environments is a facilitation of multiperspectivalism. This multiperspectivalism emerges, not necessarily in the main article entry itself, but in the edit history and talk pages that constitute the substrata of Wikipedia. Herbert Gans (1979/2004, 2011) famously argued that traditional top-down news formats privilege particular views with the consequence that what gets covered is a very narrow slice of the actual news. How that news is framed shapes how citizens attend to it—if at all. Multiperspectival news, his proposed alternative, is journalism that draws in the opinions of the many in an attempt to better encompass available opinions…If multiperspectival news is desirable, then surely so is a multiperspectival encyclopedia. The many-to-many communication on the edit and talk pages reveals behind[1]the-scenes conflicts from multiple perspectives that need(ed) negotiation before some contingent consensus was reached.

Many-to-many communication – isn’t that better than one source with one perspective? I’d think so.

Are educators concerns with Wikipedia justified? Somewhat.

While Wikipedia may not always be accurate, it is a culmination of many people coming together to add their own knowledge. So next time you write an academic paper, use Wikipedia, but be aware of its accurateness. Instead of relying on it’s validity, use it to explore multiple perspectives you might not have considered or known.