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In the news

Wikipedia wrongly blamed for Super Bowl gaffe; "digital natives" naive about Wikipedia; brief news

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By Tilman Bayer and Tom Morris

UK tabloid wrongly blames Wikipedia for US national anthem gaffe at Super Bowl

Performing at this year's Super Bowl (an American Football game on February 6 that was the most-watched US television program in history), singer Christina Aguilera mixed up the lyrics of the US national anthem, causing boos from the audience and subsequent media outrage. An article by the UK's Daily Mail claimed on the following day that she had been "singing botched lyrics found on Wikipedia". As proof, the tabloid presented a screenshot showing the wrong lyrics sung by Aguilera in the 23:52, 6 February 2011 (UTC) version of the article The Star-Spangled Banner (taken from the diff view of an edit correcting them at 23:59). It claimed "the mistake on the website, as seen hours before the Super Bowl and since fixed by a user, matches the mistake she sang". However, as was quickly pointed out by Wikipedians, the article's revision history indicates that the wrong lyrics had in fact first been inserted at 23:51 on February 6, i.e. after Aguilera's performance (in fact the immediately preceding edit at 23:50 consisted of removing a statement about the incident).

Several other news publications cited the Daily Mail's claim, including The Guardian [1] and The Age [2]. Wikimedia UK has requested a correction from the Daily Mail.[3] Jimbo Wales remarked: "I wonder how often we link to the Daily Mail as if it is actually a source for anything at all? The number of times we should do so is really quite small – for most things they are just useless".

The New York Times also mentioned Wikipedia in its coverage of the incident, but more correctly, highlighting Wikipedia's timeliness instead of its alleged unreliability: "Aguilera’s flub was heard by tens of millions of viewers. Twitter was immediately abuzz with talk of her mistake, and by the third quarter her Wikipedia page was changed to include the incident."

Students largely unaware of talk pages, version histories, NPOV and verifiability

A blog post from The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that "Wikipedia’s editing process is still a mystery to students", based on a study ("Young adults' credibility assessment of Wikipedia", appearing in this month's issue of Information Communication & Society) that had 210 US college students carry out information-finding tasks, such as: "You are helping your nephew with his homework. He needs a map of Charles Darwin's voyage around the globe, the entire voyage. Help him get such a map".

While 77% of the participants used Wikipedia at least once during the tasks, and most students appeared to know that Wikipedia content "comes from other regular Internet users like them", the study's authors (Ericka Menchen‐Trevino and Eszter Hargittai from Northwestern University) observed that

The CHE quoted Menchen-Trevino's "surprise" about these results for members of what is often called the "digital native" generation, and Hargittai as stating that "students learned what they did know about Wikipedia from professors and peers rather than from information available on the site itself", and that many of them increasingly "approach Wikipedia as a search engine."

Briefly

  • Deletion of programming languages sparks controversy: The deletion of a number of programming language related articles (Nemerle and Alice ML, both of which are currently going through deletion review) caused controversy on the programming section of Reddit and Hacker News. It also prompted the widely read programmer Zed Shaw to write a post titled "Wikipedia's Notability Requirements And The Slash", criticizing Wikipedia's deletion policy and calling on people to not donate to the Wikimedia Foundation and to try and fix what he sees as problems with the notability requirements. He also announced that he had registered the domain notnotable.com and suggested using it to host deleted articles (similar to Deletionpedia).
  • Against demonization of Wikipedia: A comment titled "Wikipedia – not the devil", by the editorial board of The Current (a student newspaper at Green River Community College in the US) objected to "anti-Wikipedia policies" by teachers and lecturers: "It's time to end the rampant misconceptions surrounding the popular collaboratively created encyclopedia known as Wikipedia, and whether it's a citable source of information. It is a qualified source for generalized information – and can be cited as such – but, like any legitimate encyclopedia, it should never be used as a primary source."
  • Wikipedia compared to Asimov character: A comment in The Hindu ("An empire without kings") praised Wikipedia as "today's de facto standard for fast and fairly reliable information on the Internet", and compared it to the fictional supercomputer Multivac that answers mankind's questions in Isaac Asimov's science fiction stories.
  • Wikipedia's deceptions exposed?: Christwire.org published what it describes as an interview with a Conservapedia editor, who accused Wikipedia of deceiving the public, e.g. by hiding the fact that it was "secretly supported by anti-US atheist Muslims" and by describing Christwire as a parody site.
  • Public Policy Initiative: An article titled "Public policy students publish work on Wikipedia" in The Reporter, a news publication by Western Carolina University, proudly reported that the institution "is one of 21 universities stretching from Harvard to Texas Southern to Berkeley selected to participate this spring in the Wikimedia Foundation’s Public Policy Initiative."
  • Using Wikipedia to drive unflattering images away: In an article on SEO news site Search Engine Land, a marketing consultant described how he had successfully used Wikipedia in "updating Google image results for online reputation management" for a model who wanted to remove "unflattering and outdated" photos from the top Google image search results of her name. The process involved securing rights to an image that the client liked, so that it could be donated under a free license, and replacing the existing image in the Wikipedia article (after finding out that "merely taking down the offending image" didn't work).
  • Wikipedia acknowledged but not cited: Lorcan Dempsey from the Online Computer Library Center mused that "we still don't appear to know what to make of Wikipedia", describing two cases: First, he noted the mention of Wikipedia in economist Edward Glaeser's new book "Triumph of the city" ("Following common practices, Wikipedia is not listed in the bibliography or citations, because any Wikipedia fact was verified with a more standard source. But I still have a great debt to the anonymous toilers of Wikipedia who made my research much easier at many points in time.") Secondly, he reported that his daughter had been given an assignment in high school to insert errors into Wikipedia (she "had her changes corrected almost straightaway, to the extent that it was not possible to complete the assignment as given. In fact, she ended up being barred from editing pages as her behavior was seen as unacceptable").
  • Quora and Wikipedia: In an article title "Why Quora Is Not Wikipedia", Sébastien Paquet (professor of Computer Science at Université du Québec à Montréal) explained the differences between Wikipedia and Quora, a question-and-answer site that has gained prominence in recent months, by noting Wikipedia's principles against original research and about citing reliable sources. "Wikipedia is past-bound: it offers knowledge of what has been known. ... By contrast to Wikipedia, Quora is not past-bound. It is future-oriented."
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Vandalism as an assignment

"Lorcan Dempsey from the Online Computer Library Center ... reported that his daughter had been given an assignment in high school to insert errors into Wikipedia"

Really, high schools? That is like an assignment to vandalize street signs. Teacher! Leave those kids alone! -- Ssilvers (talk) 22:57, 15 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Unbelievable! What were the students supposed to learn from this? Was the teacher only trying to prove a point? How irresponsible! -- Ϫ 07:34, 16 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
This isn't the first time I've heard of this sort of thing. And I've seen edit summaries from people who seriously trashed articles, claiming to be teachers illustrating to their students why Wikipedia Is Bad...aaaaaaugh! - The Bushranger One ping only 09:16, 16 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Well I hope they also 'demonstrated' how quickly they got blocked afterwards! -- Ϫ 11:43, 16 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Like any hack, this is a test of the robustness of our defense system. Teachers resent Wikipedia, not because it's unreliable (allegedly), but because it makes homework obsolete. Who would actually do their textbook reading when they can just search for the article? Ocaasi (talk) 21:19, 16 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
This isn't even the first time I have heard of a teacher doing this. It is absolutely unacceptable for a teacher to vandalize Wikipedia. It is deserving of a formal reprimand at the least for severe lack of judgment. Jason Quinn (talk) 21:39, 17 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Remember what you and your classmates were like in high school, then put yourself in the shoes of a teacher trying to help those teenager develop critical thinking skills. Why not have the class attempt to creatively vandalize articles: one would hope that with all of the automated, semi-automated, and manual counter-vandalism tools at our disposal, a certain percentage of the students would find their changes reverted. Whatever vandalism remains afterward would slowly disappear, but in the meanwhile that class had a hands-on experience that actively demonstrated to them the need for healthy skepticism about what they read online. Sounds like a teachable moment to me. 67.100.126.117 (talk) 06:23, 19 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Except that's not why they do it. They do it to demonstrate that Wikipedia is unreliable. (The example I mentioned used...rather more colorful language in the edit summary.) It's not anything close to educational, it's pure vandalism for the sake of vandalism - or for the sake of spite. And considering the way high schoolers are, odds are that even a good faith attempt to instill skepticism would only succeed in teaching most of them how to vandalise Wikipedia and that "vandalising Wikipedia is fun and cool". - The Bushranger One ping only 06:41, 19 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I second The Bushranger's reply. And regarding, your comment, 67.100.126.117, if a teacher cannot think of a better way of explaining how vandalism gets repaired that actually introducing deliberate factual errors into the encyclopedia, they are a poor teacher. Jason Quinn (talk) 23:06, 19 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
A "teachable moment"?? Instead wasting time vandalizing to demonstrate how supposedly unreliable Wikipedia is, why not do something more constructive like teaching them how to actually conduct proper research, using all available sources instead of relying on just Wikipedia. I really feel sorry for those kids, to have such a poor teacher as that. -- Ϫ 11:47, 20 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The comment by The Bushranger mentions counter-evidence regarding the reported motivation of the teacher. But the follow-on comments seem to demonstrate a lack of understanding about what a teachable moment (TM) is, which could have been avoided if either of them had clicked on the wikilink and read that "It implies "personal engagement" with issues and problems.<ref>Parker-Pope, Tara. "It’s Not Discipline, It’s a Teachable Moment," New York Times. September 15, 2008.</ref>" The engagement is the issue, and having them actually edits articles on topics that interest them fits the definition. If I were the teacher, I would have them do several edits: one with petty vandalism ("teachers sucks!"), another citing a blog entry the student created at the same time and using that blog post as a reference, and a third, legitimate contribution based a cite-worthy reference. I'd expect a bot to take care of the first (TM #1), a semi-automated or manual counter-vandalism tool would--depending on how clever the student was--have a decent chance of taking care of the second item (TM #2 in either case), and the third would probably stand (barring those patrolled by an over-opinionated editor). So if presented in a suitable context by the teacher, I think it fits the definition of teachable moments, and any bogus contributions that survive the running of the gauntlet provides the student with an engaging lesson about skepticism that is a lot more memorable than a teacher expressing his or her opinion about Wikipedia. 72.244.206.125 (talk) 01:05, 21 February 2011 (UTC) P.S. Websites like PBS provide classroom resources online...I wonder if Wikimedia Foundation has classroom resources within Wikiversity or some other project that attempt to educate teachers about the quality assurance processes behind Wikipedia?[reply]
Well, there is Wikipedia:WikiProject Classroom coordination, as well as Wikipedia:Editorial oversight and control & Wikipedia:Quality control. -- Ϫ 12:28, 21 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Other
  • It is not only college students who are largely unaware of the revisions, discussions, and editorial considerations behind the articles. Negative perceptions of Wikipedia in the general public might be very different if there were greater awareness of this information, and awareness of how to use it. Teachers: even if you tell them it is unreliable, your students do use Wikipedia, and they will use Wikipedia as adults. Teach them how to use it intelligently: Wikipedia contains the tools for its own evaluation. Though one might not expect tabloids to so, one should be able to expect any high school graduate to be able to use this information for critical evaluation. ~ Ningauble (talk) 16:02, 15 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Epistemological ignorance in reader use of WP—how we can nudge to minimize it
The piece says that most people aren't aware of the history page (and the epistemological insight that it provides). One thing about the usability and UI upgrades that I don't like is that they made the name of the tab longer ("History" changed to "View history") (no need for the extra word as far as I can figure), and, much more annoyingly, they made it so that it's often, by default window-sizing behavior, hidden behind a tiny drop-down spinner arrow that "Mr/Ms Average Epistemologically Dull-witted User" is never going to click on. At least if the "History" tab was always sitting there in plain sight, with a short label, asking to be clicked on, people would bother to mindlessly wander onto a history page more often, and maybe even learn something about where info comes from and how it's vetted (ie, epistemology). In the words of James Bridle, "Everything should have a history button." And the button should be big and shiny—not tiny and hidden. If we really care about de-idiot-izing Mr/Ms Average Reader about the epistemological guidelines of consuming content from Wikipedia, there's the place to start. And by the way, Wikipedia is more trustworthy than at least half of the traditional-editorial-mode content out there. The idea that traditional-editorial-mode content, just by being produced by that mode, is likelier to represent Real Truth™ than is WP, is a popular misapprehension—a socially sanctioned fairy tale—in other words, an emperor's-clothes situation that hasn't been properly exposed (heh) yet. About as etically accurate as, say, the idea of fan death. — ¾-10 15:42, 20 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
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