If you are used to using Wikipedia for research, you should read this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education,, which is written by a well-regarded published scholar who's written two books on the Haymarket Riot and yet could not get Wikipedia to acknowledge the many errors in its coverage of that event because "One of the people who had assumed the role of keeper of this bit of history for Wikipedia quoted the Web site's 'undue weight' policy, which states that 'articles should not give minority views as much or as detailed a description as more popular views.' He then scolded me. 'You should not delete information supported by the majority of sources to replace it with a minority view.'"
The scholar was deleting incorrect information and replacing it with correct information, but was again scolded by Wikipedia editors: "My [next attempt at] improvement lasted five minutes before a Wiki-cop scolded me, 'I hope you will familiarize yourself with some of Wikipedia's policies, such as verifiability and undue weight. If all historians save one say that the sky was green in 1888, our policies require that we write "Most historians write that the sky was green, but one says the sky was blue." ... As individual editors, we're not in the business of weighing claims, just reporting what reliable sources write.'"
In other words, Wikipedia gives you majority viewpoints, even when new research proves that the majority is actually wrong. Peer-reviewed scholarly journals function in the opposite way: They require authors to be aware of the most recent research, even (or especially) when it shows that previous research was wrong, because they do not want to repeat the errors of previous scholarship.
No comments:
Post a Comment