Hello and welcome to Crash Course: Navigating
Digital Information, I’m John Green.
According to my Wikipedia page, I’m an American
author, vlogger, writer, producer, actor,
editor, and educator.
I’ve released some books, won some awards,
got married, had kids, and I have a brother
named Hank.
There’s also a photo of me from VidCon in
2014 in which I’m wearing a football scarf
which is very on-brand.
Now, you could’ve learned a lot of that
stuff from my personal website--but then again,
I have a certain bias in how I present myself.
For instance, I would never write about Hank
on my website.
He can start his own web site if he wants
that free promo.
Also, as we’ve discussed through this series, you shouldn’t use one single site as a definitive source.
When evaluating new information, we have to
read laterally.
That means looking to other sources to provide
context.
Now it’s not always easy to find sources to
consult, but when used correctly, Wikipedia
can be a great place to start.
Right, I know that wikipedia can be unreliable.
My own wikipedia page once briefly said that
I was a professional Lacrosse player.
And I am an actor only in the sense that I
was cut from the one movie I appeared in,
but I do think we can use wikipedia for good.
INTRO
So, many of us have been told by teachers,
librarians, parents, peers, coworkers, friends,
pen pals, babysitters, nieces and nephews,
celebrity spokespeople, Instagram famous dogs,
our favorite baristas, particularly cogent
toddlers, religious leaders, Jeff Goldblum,
long lost cousins, and anonymous twitter trolls
never to use Wikipedia.
You’ve probably heard that Wikipedia is
full of totally unusable, unreliable information
written by random internet users.
I’m here to dispel that myth.
Well, me and my friends at MediaWise.
Now, it’s true that Wikipedia is editable
by almost anyone, and its content is created
by a community of mostly volunteer Wikipedians.
The whole network is owned and supported by
a non-profit, called the Wikimedia Foundation.
And Wikipedia has become the Internet’s
largest general reference work, with over
40 million articles in 301 languages, including
over 5.7 million articles in English.
While you’re there, you can learn about
anything from the Gothic Bible to Whitney
Houston’s 1985 hit “How Will I Know”
to the absolutely terrifying star-nosed mole.
I don’t know what it is about the star nosed
mole, but it freaks me out so bad.
I’ve had dreams about it.
Anyway.
It’s got a great Wikipedia page.
Now, you’re not going to learn every single
thing about a topic by reading its Wikipedia
page.
The universe is much more complicated than
even an endless online encyclopedia could
account for.
But what makes Wikipedia useful to citizens
of the internet is its breadth.
It provides information on more topics than
any print encyclopedia could, and a top-notch
Wikipedia page can provide a solid overview
of a topic and also provide citations to sources
for it’s claims.
It’s kind of like a tour guide -- it gives
you a general lay of the land and shows you
where to discover more.
Even fact checkers use Wikipedia to familiarize
themselves with unknown topics.
Now, when Wikipedia first launched in 2001,
it got a bad reputation because of how easy
it was to create and edit articles.
Essentially anyone with an internet connection
could log on and update their high school’s
“notable alumni” to include their own
name.
You could also delete your brother’s Wikipedia
page on the grounds that he wasn’t a notable
person.
Not that I ever did that!
I mean that, that would be terrible.
That flexibility, to put it diplomatically,
is likely why teachers and others have warned
you against it.
But Wikipedia has grown up a lot since 2001.
It’s nearly 18.
Wikipedia is almost an adult--and it’s starting
to act like it.
Today anyone with an internet connection
can still edit most pages on Wikipedia, but
there are much more rigorous content policies
in place and more Wikipedians and even bots
around to prevent and correct bad edits.
Like, if you repeatedly add yourself to your
high school’s notable alumni section, you
can bet an editor will be close behind to
keep you humble.
You also now have to be a registered user
to create an article and article topics have
to meet a standard of notability before they
can even be created.
Wikipedians also adhere to a set of rules
when editing and writing content.
Their core content policies are summed up
by three key phrases.
1.
A neutral point of view, meaning content must
be represented fairly, proportionately and
without bias.
2.
No original research, meaning all material
must come from a published, reliable source.
And 3.
Verifiability, meaning people reading and
editing articles must be able to check that
the information comes from a reliable source.
Now, policies and rules are all well and good,
but they’re only as good as the people who
enforce them.
So volunteer Wikipedians act as writers and
editors and also they keep each other in check.
There are also administrators, who have a
higher level of authority, and they can do
things like delete pages, or respond to vandalism,
or even lock a page so only certain people
can make changes.
But they’re not all-knowing gods.
They’re regular Wikipedians in good standing
with the community because they’ve proven
themselves to be responsible editors who use
accurate, documented information.
As of the day we filmed this video, there
are 1,206 administrators for the English Wikipedia
site.
In contrast, there are over 34.8 million registered
Wikipedians, about 134,000 of whom have edited
in the past month.
The good thing about this giant buddy system
is that it has to be pretty transparent in
order to function.
At the top of a Wikipedia article you’ll
see little tabs.
One says Article, that’s pretty self-explanatory.
And then there’s Talk.
That’s where you can see the conversation
Wikipedians have had about editing that article.
On the American Civil War page, there’s
even a Frequently Asked Questions section.
And under a page’s View History tab you
can see how and when an article has been edited,
and by whom.
Some pages are especially prone to vandals
who alter their content by adding inaccuracies
or violating Wikipedia policies.
This most frequently happens to sensitive
or controversial topics.
And so if an article is contentious or prone
to vandalism, it may be locked for protection.
There are different levels of protection under
which certain users might be able to edit
a partially locked page.
The pages of the Quran and the Big Bang, for
example, are both semi-protected.
That means no new or unregistered users can
edit it.
But there are also other kinds of protection.
To find out if a page is locked, look to its
upper right hand corner for a little padlock
icon.
Locks appear in many different colors, with
gold denoting the highest protection -- only
administrators can edit those pages.
On Wikipedia you might also come across different
notes and warning labels at the top of a page.
Some substandard pages have problems with
their structure, or their sourcing, or even
their tone.
So Wikipedians add attention-grabbing notes
to alert readers to any problems.
For instance, the page for the National Aerospace
Laboratory of the Netherlands has been flagged.
It warns: “This article contains content
that is written like an advertisement.”
Wikipedia pages are supposed to have a neutral
point of view, so that note gives readers
a heads up that this one might not.
The freestyle monster trucks page also has
a warning: it doesn’t cite any sources.
That certainly breaks the verifiability rules.
Although now I really want to know what a
freestyle monster truck show is.
Anyway thanks to these policies and warnings,
Wikipedia can be a really useful place for
getting a bird’s eye view of a topic or
starting more thorough research.
But -- and you knew there was a but coming
-- that’s not permission to use Wikipedia
as a one-stop shop for conducting /in-depth/
research, nor is it permission to cite it
in your work.
Honestly, citing an encyclopedia of any kind
just isn’t a good look for research projects.
And Wikipedia isn’t perfect, and it’s
not always accurate.
As we’ve said before in this series, when
navigating digital information, there is no
magic bullet.
There is no one perfect or objective source,
partly because everything was made by fallible
humans, and partly because the people using
sources are also fallible.
That said, Wikipedia does have real power,
and its biggest power lies in using it for
lateral reading and harvesting its citations.
Let’s try it out in the Thought Bubble.
So imagine your friend shares the following
post in your feed.
Thanks to this site I know exactly what’s
good for my body and, more importantly, WHAT
ISN’T.
It links to a website called Natural News
that you’ve never heard of.
When you visit NaturalNews.com and check the
about page, they call themselves a “science-based
natural health advocacy organization.”
And the site is jam-packed with words and
pictures.
But since you’re an excellent lateral reader,
the next thing you do to evaluate this information
is open a new tab to conduct a search.
Pro tip: search the website’s URL and the
word “wikipedia” to surface its wikipedia
entry.
Wikipedians call Natural News a “website
for the sale of various dietary supplements,
promotion of alternative medicine, controversial
nutrition and health claims, scientific fake
news, and various conspiracy theories.”
That’s, you know, a significantly different
characterization than their own about page.
The Wikipedia entry also has a section for
criticisms and controversies,
which talks about scientists, writers, and
journalists who have called out factual inaccuracies
on Natural News.
Throughout this section you’ll see superscript
numbers in brackets in between words and at
the end of sentences.
Those link to citations -- hover over them
to find either direct links or references
to where the corresponding information came
from.
Citation 22, for example, leads to a peer-reviewed
journal article calling Natural News a website
that spreads "irresponsible health information."
Citation 35 links to a post from climate change
site the Grist titled, literally, “Don’t
believe anything you read at Natural News.”
Thanks Thought Bubble So, Now you have a clear
understanding that this website and its content
are very controversial and considered unreliable
by other outlets.
And whenever you are interested in a fact
on a Wikipedia page, look for the embedded
citation.
You can then check in on those sources and
follow up to confirm the information you find.
I’ve been using this in my own life.
For instance, I recently reviewed the Taco
Bell breakfast menu for my podcast, The Anthropocene
Reviewed, and I started at the Wikipedia page
for Taco Bell, which through the citations
led me to the AMAZING biography of Taco Bell
founder Glen Bell, “Taco Titan: The Glen
Bell Story.”
So if you click any of those superscript numbers
on a Wikipedia page, you’ll find the full
list of references for that page at the bottom.
And those also link back to their locations
in the text, like an index.
Now not all pages have citations, and not
all citations are reliable citations.
But this is a place where you can quickly
look for more information from authoritative
sources.
The main criticism of Wikipedia concerns the
reliability of its information.
As we discussed earlier in the episode, the
community does have policies in place to regulate
its articles.
They have ways of letting readers know about
inaccuracies or incomplete articles, too.
Which are certainly helpful.
But plenty of bad information does slip through.
It sometimes even leads to editing wars between
Wikipedians who edit back and forth to try
to set the record straight.
Over the years a variety of studies have evaluated
how Wikipedia measures up to similar reference
works or examined the accuracy of selected
articles.
And the results of these have been mixed,
with some finding Wikipedia comparable to
commercial encyclopedias and others finding
pretty serious errors of omission.
And accuracy isn’t Wikipedia’s only weakness.
Its community has also been criticized for
gender and racial biases, both for the kind
of community it fosters, and for the topics
it covers.
The content on Wikipedia is a product of those
who get to participate, so it will inherently
reflect any inequalities in its community.
One example of this is that the article about
Toilet Paper Orientation is incredibly carefully
written and cited, whereas the English-language
article on the Indus Valley Civilization city
of Harappa is much less detailed.
Wikipedia is also dependent on published sources,
which have their own gender and racial biases
and contribute to what is and is not verifiable
on Wikipedia.
But as we know from our last episode, it’s
possible to use sources that are systemically
skewed towards one group’s perspective,
as long as we take that perspective into account
when evaluating its information.
In this case, that means treating Wikipedia
as a launchpad, not a finish line.
It’s not where you should do all of your
research and lateral reading.
But it’s a good place to start.
One last note: Some researchers skip the body
of a Wikipedia article entirely and head straight
for the citations to look for trustworthy
sources.
After all, some pages have hundreds of references
to primary sources, scholarly journals, and
other strong publications.
We should think of Wikipedia as another tool
in your information evaluation tool kit.
You go there for a general overview of a topic,
or a stepping stone to more references, or
to use as one lateral reading source among
several.
And as long as you know how and when to use
it appropriately, Wikipedia can be a great
friend.
But it shouldn’t be your only friend.
And actually, now that we’re talking about
it, I feel like like all your friends, really,
they should probably be people.
Or dogs.
Or a cat, if you’re that kind of person.
Thanks for watching. We'll see you next week.
