Deakin expert warns parents and teachers on Wikipedia

A Deakin University knowledge management expert has warned academics, teachers and students about continuing to use the Wikipedia as a credible information source.

Associate Professor Sharman Lichtenstein, from the University's School of Information Systems, says the reliance by students on the Wikipedia for sourcing information and the acceptance of the practice by teachers and academics were crowding out valuable knowledge and creating a generation unable to find the best expert knowledge even if they wanted to.

Professor Lichtenstein, along with Dr Craig Parker, is leading a team of researchers to map out how the Wikipedia creates its articles. She said the Wikipedia presented unwary users with a number of issues. These were presented to a conference earlier this year.*

"Information in a traditional encyclopaedia is developed by experts with recognised credentials, experience and expertise in the field," she said.

"However the Wikipedia in contrast prides itself on being built by the collaboration of members of the public rather than traditional experts guided by an expert editorial board. "While research shows there is some advantage to this approach it also shows that the contributors are mainly amateurs rather than experts in their field. As amateurs, they lack the credentials and experience to make judgements about what knowledge should be included and what should not."

"The anonymity of many of the editors and administrators of the Wikipedia also means users are unable to establish the credibility or otherwise of the author."

Professor Lichtenstein said topics for the Wikipedia were selected for inclusion on the basis of their so-called notability. "This method of topic selection is subjective and fosters discrimination and elitism, the very things the Wikipedia is against," she said. "The Wikipedia has created new and anonymous elite 'editors' and administrators."

Professor Lichtenstein explained that the popularity of the Wikipedia reflected a growing societal mistrust of traditional scientific research and experts, who are considered elites.

"Australians are notorious in their disrespect of academics, scholars and proffessionals, so-called elites," she said. "Yet as I say to my students 'if you had to have brain surgery would you prefer as your surgeon someone who has been through medical school, trained, operated and researched in the field, or someone who has learned how to do brain surgery from the Wikipedia?"

"People are unwittingly trusting the information they find in the Wikipedia, yet experience has shown it can be wrong, incomplete, biased, or misleading. Parents and teachers think it is ok, but it is a light weight model of knowledge and people don't know about the underlying model of how it operates."

Professor Lichtenstein warned that if teachers, employers and academics continue to accept the Wikipedia as a legitimate reference, the valuable knowledge of experts will become increasingly disputed and marginalised, and inferior knowledge will be learned and applied in the workplace in its stead. People who rely on the Wikipedia will also lose the ability to find and critically evaluate a range of expert sources.

*The Wikipedia – Experts, Expertise and Ethical Challenges – presented to the Australian Institute of Computer Ethics conference in February, 2008