Musings

Is Wikipedia Appropriate for College Citations?

February 21st, 2007
By Stephen Northcutt


CT News Update lead headline story begins[1] "Vermont's Middlebury College has banned the use of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia as an acceptable source of academic information for students, United Press International reported."[2] According to Wikipedia, Middlebury is a small, highly selective liberal arts college located in the rural New England shire town of Middlebury, Vermont, United States. Drawing 2,350 undergraduates from all 50 United States, the District of Columbia and over 70 foreign countries, the College particularly is well known for the strength of its foreign language, writing, environmental, and international studies programs. Today, Middlebury consistently ranks among the top liberal arts colleges in the nation and often is referred to as one of the Little Ivies.[3] So we started searching to find the truth and found the following on Middlebury's web site, the History Department voted unanimously in January to adopt the statement, which bans students from citing the open-source encyclopedia in essays and examinations. Whereas Wikipedia is extraordinarily convenient and, for some general purposes, extremely useful, it nonetheless suffers inevitably from inaccuracies deriving in large measure from its unique manner of compilation, the statement reads. Students are responsible for the accuracy of information they provide, and they cannot point to Wikipedia or any similar source that may appear in the future to escape the consequences of errors.[4] Normally we would be concerned that this is not forward looking, but then this is the History department. But is this a good idea?

The online student weekly posted an op ed by Chandler Koglmeier that raises some interesting points. In our country, which has always valued innovation and change, how can you justify censoring the flow of information on our recently available platform? Secondly, democratization of information is happening. Welcome to the 21st century. Consumer generated content has blossomed in the past few years and the people have truly taken control of the information platforms (see blogs, message boards, online video content for details). What does that mean for academia? Maybe its time for a little academic re-evaluation of truth. If enough people believe it, does that make it true? Isn't acceptance a reality in itself?[5]

But can we call this censorship? According to Wikipedia, which is the number one hit on Google for the word censorship. Censorship is the removal of information from the public, or the prevention of circulation of information, where it is desired or felt best by some controlling group or body that others are not allowed to access the information which is being censored.[6] However,if no information is being removed, does this policy prevent the circulation of information? Probably not. It is certainly convenient and fast to look things up using Wikipedia as the professors state, but if that was the only source of the information, it couldn't be on Wikipedia and you expect institutions of higher learning to teach research. Using Wikipedia barely qualifies as research. Kolglmeier's second point about democratization of information is interesting. On the one hand, blogs, etc. are certainly having their moment in the sun. On the other hand, you use Google, a corporation's commercial product, to find the information you are looking for.

Perhaps, the following statement is the most troubling of all, Students are responsible for the accuracy of information they provide, and they cannot point to Wikipedia or any similar source that may appear in the future to escape the consequences of errors.[7] Accuracy of information and history gets complicated. Wikepidia has an excellent writeup on historical revisionism that includes a famous quote:

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.
- Napoleon Bonaparte.[8]

There are advantages and disadvantages to the Wikipedia approach, but at the end of the day, it is probably at least as accurate, on average, as anything written by a single individual that does not go through a peer review process. Wikipedia has an entry for the reliability of Wikipedia. A 2006 review of Wikipedia by LibraryJournal.com, using a panel of librarians, the toughest critics of reference materials, whatever their format,[9] asked long standing reviewers to evaluate three areas of Wikipedia (popular culture, current affairs, and science), and concluded While there are still reasons to proceed with caution when using a resource that takes pride in limited professional management, many encouraging signs suggest that (at least for now) Wikipedia may be granted the librarian's seal of approval. A reviewer who decided to explore controversial historical and current events, hoping to find glaring abuses concluded I was pleased by Wikipedia's objective presentation of controversial subjects, but that, as with much information floating around in cyberspace, a healthy degree of skepticism and skill at winnowing fact from opinion are required.[10] Further, the point of a citation can be topermit readers to put claims to the test by consulting earlier works. Authors often engage earlier work directly, explaining why they agree or differ from earlier views.[11]

The bottom line: it would have seemed to be more optimal to simply limit the percentage of citations Wikipedia could be used in a paper to five percent or so. That way, students are encouraged to use all of the assets available to them, but you avoid overly "Wikied" term papers.

  1. News Update [CampusTechnology@1105Newsletters.com] Feb 20, 2007
  2. http://campustechnology.com/news_article.asp?id=20255&typeid=150
  3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middlebury_College
  4. http://www.middlebury.edu/about/newsevents/archive/2007/newsevents_633060285324980285.htm
  5. http://media.www.middleburycampus.com/media/storage/paper446/news/2007/02/14/Opinions/OpEd-Wikipedia.Ban.Is.A.Slippery.Slope-2717613.shtml
  6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship
  7. See note 4 above
  8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_revisionism
  9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citations
  10. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia
  11. See note 10 above