User:Wikimachine/WikiProject Awareness newspaper

About Wikipedia & Its Significance In ABC By XYZ

Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone, has currently lost the interest in the ABC community. The questionable credibility of Wikipedia articles and the ABC culture contribute to the dormant relationship between the two entities. The status quo undermines this year’s drive for global perspective within the school. [1]

Questionable Credibility

The main cause for the neglect of Wikipedia has been its reliability. Many ABC teachers, such as Commander A, disallow students to use Wikipedia in their research projects. The debate team rejects the use of Wikipedia articles as a source of reference. The general consensus hovers around the dubious qualification of the encyclopedia’s editors, lack of reliable reference, and susceptibility to vandalism. [2] In addition, the “Criticism of Wikipedia” article in Wikipedia has identified lists systemic bias, abuse of power, copy right issues, exposure to political and corporate operatives, and threat to traditional publishing as possible problems within the system. [3]

Student Culture

ABC students boast nearly zero percent participation in the online encyclopedia [1]. The possible reasons include busy lifestyle, lack of interest in global events, and the frustration with the complicated editing interface (wiki). WikiProject Countering systemic bias describes a “Wikipedian”: [4]

“The average Wikipedian on English Wikipedia (1) is male, (2) is technically-inclined, (3) is formally educated, (4) speaks English to an extent, (5) is White, (6) is aged 15-49, (7) is from a predominantly Christian country, (8) is from an industrialized nation, (9) is from the Northern Hemisphere, and (10) is more likely to be employed in intellectual pursuits than in practical skills or physical labor.”

ABC students meet all of the criteria of a typical Wikipedian except “technically-inclined”, which probably is the most significant factor in determining the students’ rate of participation in the internet community. A few students within the school lack access to the computer and/or internet at home. Not only is participation in sports the policy of the school, but ABC students also enjoy sports as hobby and social activity; therefore, not only are the students unable to allocate time for Wikipedia, but also their preoccupation in school and community events avert the students from seeking interests outside the hill.

Current ABC Participation

The highlight of ABC participation in Wikipedia is the “ABC” article [5]. The article was initially begun by an anonymous user from the school’s internet IP address of aa.b.ccc.aaa on September 19, 2006, with one sentence: [6]

“ABC is an elite all-boys' school based in Nashville [Nashville]. Bill Frist [BIill Frist], Senate Majorite Leader, went there.”

The article’s POV (point of view) tone in its initial form led to a nearly successful deletion process [7]. Quote one Wikipedian, Dpbsmith:

“One which is no doubt important to the "more than 10,000 young men [it has sent] into the world since 1867, prepared by an exceptional, balanced education." I believe I'm going to remove the word "elite" from the silly article, however.” 

After several cleanup efforts, the article became more NPOV (neutral point of view), which is the official policy of Wikipedia. The article is still disorganized, with the “History” section covering a wide variety of topics including popular culture and policies. ABC’s anonymous edits spill into a wide variety of articles such as “Harpeth Hall School”, “Kearsney College” in South Africa, “High-speed rail”, and “File sharing” [8]. There have been several vandalisms, for which the administrators and vandal patrollers have left warning messages on the IP address’s talk page. Here is an example of the preliminary vandalisms received by ABC’s IP Address:

“Please do not add nonsense to Wikipedia. It is considered vandalism. If you would like to experiment, use the sandbox. Thank you. This is regarding Current events -- CyrilB 15:36, 18 April 2006 (UTC)”

Continued aggressions have escalated to final warnings with threats of IP address block. ABC school IP address has been blocked from editing several times because of the failures to comply [9]. However, in comparison with the vandalisms from IP addresses of other educational institutions, vandalisms from ABC are very small and minor.

Countermeasures For Reliability And Stability

Several informal in-class surveys at ABC resulted in no conclusive counts, as DEF meeting sample showed nearly all “Nay” to “Do you believe that Wikipedia is a credible source?” while Dr. GHI’s 7th period Statistics class showed 100% “Yay”. Furthermore, the samples were convenience samples, not simple random samples with size equal to or greater than 30. And answers were much more complex, including “I use Wikipedia, but I don’t think it’s credible,” and “Wikipedia’s reliable on some subjects, but on others it’s not.”[1]

Attempting to reason with the “Nay”ers produced repeated comments on the vandalisms at Wikipedia – that Wikipedia cannot be reliable because of the vandalisms, even if they are fixed on a daily basis. However, this logic is a complete fallacy. Just as misprinting (i.e. AP Statistic curriculum book that required several in-class corrections) cannot be prevented by even the most widely recognized publishers, vandalism is an inevitable part of the encyclopedia. In addition, most vandalism is obvious and not disabling, and the users have the option to check on the history if they suspect false information.

Theoretically, the overwhelming amount of vandalisms that appear daily on Wikipedia should result in gradual deterioration of the system; however, in response to the complicacy of using the “history” tab, Wikipedia has adopted the use of programs that provide automatic shortcuts to trace recent edits, highlight the differences between the previous and the current editions of the article, and place vandalism warning messages on user talk pages [14]. Only qualified registered accounts and administrators can have access to these programs. Bots, or processes, also help to curtail the need for human participation in correcting certain vandal edits [15].

The main issue that plagues Wikipedia’s credibility is not vandalism, but, rather, the quality of the Wikipedians themselves. For a more accurate picture of how (in) credible Wikipedia is, the internal institutions must be examined. First are the “administrators”, who constitute the bureaucracy of Wikipedia. They are elected by the peers at “Wikipedia:Requests for adminship”, and the stringent screening process and the nature of voting ensure that the quality of the administrators remain consistent throughout. The “admins” serve to stabilize the system against vandalisms and revert wars through the option of IP blocking. Although not an official policy, the administrators’ suggestions tend to serve as final voices in disputes. In cases of unjust use of the adminship powers, the administrator can lose his or her status at the verdict of the Arbitration Committee, Jimbo Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, or voting at “Wikipedia:Requests for de-adminiship” [12]. Administrators also have privileges of deleting improper articles and images, protecting and semi-protecting pages that are under volatile editing wars between users or under continued vandalism. Registered users can edit semi-protected pages, but anonymous users cannot; protected pages can only be edited by the administrators. Other privileges for registered users absent in anonymous users include the ability to upload images, have user pages, vote to settle disputes, and participate in various internal institutions, such as WikiProject Military history, Portal:NATO, and the Mediation Committee [13].

Just as ABC stimulates competition between students through contests (i.e. National Latin Examination) and honors (i.e. Totomoi), Wikipedia includes several means of providing recognition. Although Jimbo Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, strongly asserts otherwise, adminship has been widely regarded as an honorable privilege among the Wikipedians. Various awards called “barnstars” are awarded at local level among users. Articles that meet all or most of the Wikipedia standards, including the use of reliable references, proper format, superb grammar and English, neutral point of view, and compliance with the copyright laws [10], are presented as “Good articles” and “Featured articles”. Most of good or featured articles have gone through peer review at “Wikipedia:Peer review” [11].

“Neutral point of view”, offering multiple perspectives on a single subject at an objective basis, is the founding principle of Wikipedia. The NPOV policy requires that weasel wording be avoided (i.e. harsh colonial rule colonial rule), and that any positive or negative assertion be provided with a countering statement. Those who claim that Wikipedia is not reliable because of the neutrality issues, think again. Because most reputable sources make affirmative statements, even on controversial issues, readers can deduce incorrect implications through mutually exclusive reasoning with the facts. Wikipedia, however, provides a “neutrality” tag for articles that are under dispute by the editors (and probably the only encyclopedia to do so), and thereby avoids even the possibility of making POV implications with the factual statements.

Systemic bias, the inherent tendency of a process to favor particular outcomes [16], is a major part of the NPOV issues that the community faces. As described above, an average Wikipedian is a white male adult with fluent English. In result, the focus of the English Wikipedia in its area of coverage has been limited to topics that would most interest an average American. For example, articles concerning Africa are small in number, and poor in quality. Because fewer editors watch over those articles, they are more susceptible to unchecked vandalism. “Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering systemic bias” is Wikipedia’s response to the issue [18], in which the project members identify and develop neglected articles and topics.

``It is strange that a minor Pokemon character will get a 1,200-word article, but a Fortune 500 company will get . . . maybe 100 words,'' – Kohs [23] Imbalance between the amounts of relevant information and trivial facts has been attributed to the poor quality of Wikipedia. The main cause is the “inclusionist” movement that has used “Wikipedia is not a paper encyclopedia” guideline to advocate the argument that any addition of knowledge is good.[24] “Deletionists” have begun to appear as a counterculture to the “inclusionists”[24], and have managed to keep the articles from becoming a collection of random information. The Good and Featured Article standards seem to side with the “deletionists”.

Copyright infringement in usage of images has been a major in Wikipedia. Although only images with GFDL (GNU Free Documentation License), CC (Creative Commons), Copyleft, and few other licensing can be uploaded to Wikipedia, some images, such as book covers, company logos, etc., use the fair use rationale, legal under U.S. copyright laws. Other images that have uncertain copyright status or unverifiable citation cannot be used in Wikipedia. Some Wikipedians upload their own photographs and hand-drawn/CG illustrations in order to avoid copyright infringements.

Successes and Progresses of Wikipedia

Wikpiedia, initially launched as an English project on January 15, 2001, has expanded into 250 languages, with 17 having more than 50,000 articles each [19]. The total of 7.5 million articles are maintained and expanded under the oversight of 750,000 active user accounts [22]. The English Wikipedia currently has more than 1.4 million articles, and its growth has been exponential until recently. The science magazine Nature conducted a study in 2005 that compared the accuracy of science articles of Wikipedia and Britannica. Out of 42 articles, 4 errors were found in Wikipedia and 3 in Britannica. The Guardian’s study identified three problems with Wikipedia articles, including poor construction of prose, minor inaccuracies or omissions of facts, and poor balance in the areas of focus. However, Wikipedia was found to be factually sound and useful overall [21]. The IBM Research’s Collaborative User Experience Group has used Wikipedia to demonstrate the potentials for their “history flow” program, and, in process, found that vandalism is not an issue in Wikipedia [20]:

“As publicly editable sites, Wikis are vulnerable to vandalism. We've examined many pages on Wikipedia that treat controversial topics, and have discovered that most have, in fact, been vandalized at some point in their history. But we've also found that vandalism is usually repaired extremely quickly--so quickly that most users will never see its effects.”

Wikipedia remains as a scholarly source for most universities, including Yale [26], while few colleges have banned the usage of Wikipedia by the students in their research papers (i.e. Middlebury [25]). Courts have begun to permit the usage of Wikipedia to define minor subjects [27]. According to a survey by the Brand Channel, Wikipedia is currently one of the top five brands in the world.[28]

Conclusion

Wikipedia is a major focal point for the common people to contest and disrespect the elite academia. The anonymous identity shared by all users ensures equality, and the independence from voting (except in administrative processes that require final verdicts) makes the system a perfect consensus-based democracy (as opposed to the Athenian democracy critiqued by Plato and Thoreau). Even a single outlier opposing a decision can, with reasonable assertions, change the outcome of a skewed discussion. The fact that Wikipedia provides a vehicle for the individuals to make an immediate impact to the world is alone a reason sufficient enough for the Wikipedians to strive to compete with other reputable encyclopedias (i.e. MSN Encarta). Wikipedia offers ABC students space for the true freedom in writing, as opposed to the theme papers that are sent to the front lines of World War III and returned as sticks and stones from World War IV. The opportunity must be spent productively; ABC cannot afford to have vandalism warnings and IP address bans. And teachers too must get rid of their premature construction of Wikipedia as a random scribble written by the uneducated, when they have not even participated within the system. At least, the teachers should allow Good and Featured Articles in students’ research assignments. It really does no justice for people to not appreciate everything that is happening behind the scene. A student from the International Academy (ranks #1 among public schools in the US) in Chicago said that one of his/her music history assignments was to create and edit a Wikipedia article in place of a research paper. A similar could be done at ABC. Even a Wiki club could be founded. People must embrace this new history, not reject. They always have the option to fix.