I was not surprised to hear that WikiPedia was tightening its editorial policies. But after reading this article in today’s Times, I was intrigued and heartened by the limited way in which they’ve done so. According to this article, when Wikipedia limits who can edit an entry, it’s for a few days, a “cooling down period” to get vandals to lay off. Or they restrict an entry to editors who’ve been registered at Wikipedia for more than 4 days. Sounds quite lenient, really. And it sounds like it’s enough. The list of protected articles, which cannot be edited, includes “Human Rights in the People’s Republic of China,” and “Cuba;” articles which can be edited only by those who’ve been on Wikipedia for four or more days include “God,” “Michael Jackson,” “Christianity,” and (intriguingly) “Republic of Maldova.”
I’m sure we’ve all seen examples of Wikipedia vandalism. There’s a nice illustration of how it appears, and how swiftly those who see a particular entry as their “realm” may arrive to correct it, in Jon Udall’s amazing screencast “Heavy Metal Umlaut, the Movie” (which I’ve mentioned on the blog before as a wonderful illustration of how wikis work and how Wikipedia is edited–it’s interesting as well as really funny). In this example, vandalism appears and is corrected seconds later. Other items, which are not so closely monitored, may retain errors much longer. Those I’ve caught have been pretty blatant, and so not too “dangerous” to any but the most naive readers.
All of this is by way of saying that things are not bad in the Wikipedia world. Wikipedia users may not be up to 100% freedom, all the time. But they’re not doing so badly after all. The honor system works for most people, most of the time.
The best soundbite in the Times article was this:
Wikipedians often speak of how powerfully liberating their first contribution felt. Kathleen Walsh, 23, a recent college graduate who majored in music, recalled the first time she added to an article on the contrabassoon.
“I wrote a paragraph of text and there it was,” recalled Ms. Walsh. “You write all these pages for college and no one ever sees it, and you write for Wikipedia and the whole world sees it, instantly.”
That’s the first reason I love Wikipedia.
The second? A while back, I was co-facilitating at a seminar for teachers on ways to use blogs, wikis and so on. During a session in which participants looked at Wikipedia (in most cases for the first time), one teacher, new to Wikipedia, registered and started an entry on an African tribe that she noticed was not included. Within minutes, it had been added to and elaborated on by another user. It’s hard not to get excited about collaborative encyclopedia writing, in real-time, with complete strangers.
How are you using Wikis with your students?
Well, we know Wikipedia isn’t doing this to prevent the Chinese from changing the section on China human rights; Wikipedia is blocked in China.
I think this is really more of a cosmetic tightening, than anything else, and Jimmy Wales expresses that quite well. The real issue is that we need to change the way people see wikipedia…because it really is something different from a traditional encyclopedia, and doesn’t bear comparison with that model–it’s an apples/oranges comparison.
This is how I try to use this resource with my own students…to help them question and critique *all* information resources. Wikipedia foregrounds a process which is vital for college students (and probably all citizens) to master.
Last week, a student in my online class emailed me in confusion because she had found an error (a relatively minor one) in a wikipedia article about a story we had read. She knew that she was right, and the article was wrong, but she was troubled because what she had absorbed from her earlier teaching was that print resources, especially encyclopedias, are always right. So she was in a quandary. It was a perfect “teachable moment”–and even more perfect when (with a little nudging) she went in and corrected the wikipedia article, and then posted on the discussion page to explain her change.
Coincidentally, my article on this subject was published this week at Academic Commons http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/essay/Ugoretz-social-software-folksonomy