Open Discussion
| Assessing Information Integrity Online |
| Written by Simon Baumer | |
| Monday, 19 March 2007 | |
|
I was recently reading through a page long Wikipedia entry about the band that I was in almost a decade ago. Although it was a wonderful read, I’d say that less then half of the information had any truth to it. Certain elements of the Wikipedia entry were clearly false (proven by the absence of the Rolling Stones review that was referenced on the page, as well as a lack of police report about any incidents in various cities that the author of the page claimed occurred). After returning from my trip down memory lane I was left wondering, how can we accurately assess the integrity of online communities and the informational resources that these communities develop? First let’s travel back to the days before the Internet was around, and explore how the integrity of pre-internet information was assessed. I’ll spare everyone the horribly inaccurate history lesson and jump straight to twenty years ago, just pre-internet. The world of academia played a large part in the verification and fact-checking of major contributions to the world of non-fiction. Papers published in scholarly journals by accredited professors that hold doctorates in this or that, and studied for x many years in this prestigious university start discussions with others in the field, until little tidbits of knowledge are produced, the most basic of which later become common-place in the classrooms of second graders. To many, this makes sense. A relatively small group of people who dedicate most of their lives to acquiring knowledge all agree on certain things that make sense to them. When they disagree it becomes the on-and-off again topic of TIME magazine features and the focus of countless BBC specials or 60 Minutes episodes for a decade or two. Why we are comfortable with a relatively small group of individuals (who are historically mostly white and male) declaring how the world works, and how it used to work, and how it will work in the future is beyond me, but until it changes, that’s how it is. Enter the dawn of a new era, the ushering in of the World Wide Web. Now, we have things like Wikipedia, where articles are authored by individuals like you and me, who maybe went to college for a bit, maybe finished, maybe went on to graduate school, and maybe didn’t. They may not have graduated high school, but may have learned a trade from their mother or father who learned from their mother or father and acquired tidbits of knowledge and skill that can’t be learned from a textbook. The things that we write are then further modified and extended with additional information by others who may or may not have any ‘formal education’. When the contents of a Wikipedia page then come into question by a significant number of its viewers, someone who may or may not have gone through a rigorous ‘formal education’ process comes along and marks it for removal or approval. Who decides what information from the entry gets removed? Not all of the information about my high school band was inaccurate. The lifespan of the band, members of the group, and type of music that we played was all accurate information, and yet the entire entry has been removed from Wikipedia. Imagine if a book got one fact wrong, a year, number, or detail of an event. Sure it would come under significant scrutiny, and so would those who were responsible for fact-checking the information and verifying against numerous other sources, but wouldn’t the incorrect data just be corrected? Because of the open format, many from the world of academia exclude Wikipedia as a legitimate source for citations in scholastic works, and I understand why. If one person with ill-intent can modify a Wikipedia page to their liking, then the integrity of the entire system can be called into question. This begs a bigger question, are online communities whose goal is to provide information to web users only as strong as their weakest link? I don’t know the answer to either of the questions I have posed, but I do know that the open community format does circumvent many of the bottlenecks that exist for those trying to author printed content. There is no need for concern about financing, printing materials, hiring editors or fact-checkers, because the community serves all these roles. This doesn’t necessarily make the open community format any more accurate or beneficial then their more streamlined and limited counterparts/competition. Napoleon Bonaparte supposedly said that “history is but a fable agreed upon” and I agree. What the open community format does is allow a broader source from which information can flow and a broader interest to be served. If communities like Wikipedia are the means to having a much larger base of those who agree upon the fable, then I am exciting about their impact on fables yet to be written and even on those that have already been accepted as historical fact. Comments (1)
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