WikiInfoLit Unit 5 Page 6
Wrapping Up Unit 5
Objectivity is a reliance on evidence and reason to back up a claim, but an information source like Wikipedia cannot do that. Instead it must back up its claims with secondary sources, which hopefully muster the evidence and logical arguments to support the claim. But Wikipedia's criteria for acceptable sources to cite may in some cases actually compromise Wikieditors' ability to find objective secondary sources.
What is interesting is that the same rules may be hindering our students when they write their term papers under our rules. Publication bias means that they will not find as many articles with negative results as those with positive results, even though many more studies may have come up with negative results. Political realities may mean that the official histories that students cite bear less resemblance to what actually happened than the unvouched-for oral histories of obscure individuals.
And yet, without requiring "reliable, published secondary sources" from "reputable publishers", what can we do to stem the tide of mistakes, innanities, conspiracy theories, and pseudoscience?
- Our students are not anonymous Wikieditors; they can be held accountable for the information they present.
- Mistakes and biases remain in Wikipedia articles when there are no eyes on them, but student assignments are subject to scrutiny, and like Wikipedia articles with many active editors and visitors, mistakes and biases can be detected and corrected.
- Rather than relying exclusively on the cognitive authority of traditionally published sources, we can hold our students and ourselves to a higher standard and evaluate the quality (accuracy, validity, objective truth) not just of the information source, but of the information contained in it.
Supplemental Material:
Collective Intelligence and the Neutral Point of View: The Case of Wikipedia, by Greenstein and Zhu.