In the news
Professor says Wikipedia crowds out expert knowledge
Wikipedia breeds 'unwitting trust' says IT professor - Deakin University associate professor Sharman Lichtenstein believes that the increasing use of Wikipedia creates blind trust in information, to the detriment of valuable knowledge and expert opinion. She says that Australians already disrespect intellectuals and academics, but she asks us to consider whether we would use a trained brain surgeon or a student who has just read Wikipedia for brain surgery. She notes that Wikipedia prides itself on being built by groups of lay citizens, and experts are unlikely to contribute anyway because they would expect to be paid. Credibility of Wikipedia articles is questioned because of the formation of "elite" editors and administrators, a trend that has caused growing dissatisfaction with Wikipedia's editorial process, leading others to create competitors to Wikipedia.
Other mentions
Other recent mentions in the online media include:
- Wikipedia's Zealots - An editor who receives personal communication about a scientist's views on global warming edits Wikipedia to include these communications but is reverted by other editors.
- Scientific citations in Wikipedia - The pattern of citations on Wikipedia is compared with the Journal Citation Reports, which counts journal citations; Wikipedia is increasingly using structured citation markup.
- David Shankbone with Colleen Asper, an interview with User:David Shankbone in New York City literary print magazine The Brooklyn Rail about his photography and interviews.
Discuss this story
Re Sharman Lichtenstein: Wikipedia:Researching with Wikipedia. If academics aren't saying as much to their students, then they aren't teaching them well. - Jmabel | Talk 20:04, 17 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Re "Zealots": Um...Lawrence Solomon's (LS's) grasp of the article history (a topic which is very easy to figure out given how self-evident it is) is extremely weak. (1) He looks at the history and thinks that User:Tabletop is the same user as User:KimDabelsteinPetersen? You don't even need a brain to see that Tabletop was just a random editor who happened to fix one small typo a week before the edit war that LS discusses. When KDP reverted to the last version by Tabletop, that had NOTHING to do with Tabletop being deeply involved in a climate science debate. (2) Also, LS seemed to think that the phrase "Reverted to revision 198494083 by Tabletop" meant that Tabletop was responsible for the article's entire content. LS started railing about how "Tabletop's changes claim to represent Peiser's views". Tabletop had NOTHING to do with any of the climate content, as anyone with half a brain could tell by perusing the history. He was just passing through, fixing one typo. (3) LS writes in a published column that he doesn't know if KDP is a he or a she, yet right on KDP's user page it says "This user is male." When I started reading LS's column, I was thinking, "Wow, this KDP person must be so wrongheaded; poor LS for being reverted; poor Wikipedia for being hijacked by zealots." By the time I realized how many stupid mistakes LS had made, of the type that don't even require much common sense or knowledge of Wikipedia, I was thinking, "Why would I believe any climate science coming from someone so mistake-prone"? 72.94.230.117 (talk) 21:23, 21 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]