Using Wikipedia

The Truth Matters, Chapter Eleven

This is the eleventh chapter of my book, The Truth Matters. Chapter one is here, chapter two is here, chapter three is here, chapter four is here, chapter five is here, chapter six is here, chapter seven is here, chapter eight is here, chapter nine is here, chapter ten is here.

Key points:

· It is a very powerful but deeply flawed research tool.

· It’s a great place to start research and a terrible place to end it.

· How to search the internet effectively.

Wikipedia is simultaneously one of the most wonderful reference sources ever invented, a true gift of the internet era, but is also one of the most frustrating and easily misused.

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, Wikipedia is not always a dependable source and much of what appears there is not necessarily accurate. But it depends a lot on the nature of the subject one is researching.

In all my years of using Wikipedia I don’t think I have ever been misled about a basic historical fact such as when someone was born or where or standard biographical information. I find it most useful as a place to start when I want to learn about a subject I know nothing about. Let me repeat—a place to start. You never want to finish your research on Wikipedia.

Where Wikipedia is more problematic is when dealing with hot, current topics. Both the great strength and weakness of Wikipedia is that volunteers write almost all of it and anyone can initiate or edit an entry, subject to verification by Wikipedia editors and possibly the conflicting views of other volunteers.

Sometimes people abuse Wikipedia or try to impose a particular point of view on contentious issues. Politicians have been known to have their staffs repeatedly edit in or out certain material and Wikipedia must sometimes take action to prevent it.

The best thing about Wikipedia to me is the reference material. Sometimes all I need is the name of one good book or article on a subject to begin my research and don’t know where to start. If I have even a single reference I can plug it into Google Scholar and see whether it has been widely referenced, which is an important clue to its standing and reliability on the subject, and find other books and articles on the same subject.

Sometimes the authors of Wikipedia entries are people with inside knowledge of the subject they are writing about. For example, many years ago I started my own Wikipedia entry with a bit of information about my life and work. For quite a few years now, it has been the very first thing that turns up when someone searches my name in Google or some other search engine.

But I confess that I have not looked at my entry for a long time. The reason is that I once looked at it and found that some inaccuracy had crept in and attempted to fix it. A Wikipedia editor asked me for documentation before allowing the change to take effect. I said the documentation is that I am me and I know that what was written was wrong. The editor told me that wasn’t good enough. Lacking documentation that I could link to, I gave up my effort to fix my own Wikipedia entry and have not looked at it since. I have no idea whether the inaccuracy I attempted to fix is still there or not.

To me, this is a cautionary tale about the risk of relying on Wikipedia. Nevertheless, I assume that someone who knows nothing about me will find a few things that are accurate—jobs I’ve held, books I’ve written etc.—that would inform them about other places to look for information about me that is in fact reliable.

It helps if one thinks of Wikipedia as simply the latest version of an old standby, the encyclopedia. When I was a child, every family had one. Salesmen would sell them door-to-door and supermarkets might run weekly specials of one volume for a very low price to lure shoppers into the store. The biggest problem with them is that they rapidly went out of date and the brevity of the entries often made them of little value. But like Wikipedia, they were usually a good place to start one’s research on some topic you knew nothing about.

The next step, then and as it should be today, was the local library. The amount of material available on my local library’s website is vast and includes reputable encyclopedias, written, curated and edited by professional experts. And unlike the encyclopedias of old, they are continuously kept up to date.

One trick I use to determine the usefulness of a reference source is to search a topic I already know a bit about. Its discussion of that topic will usually tell me right away whether it is thorough or superficial, biased or objective, slipshod or dependable. If I know that the discussion that I am familiar with is reliable, I know I can usually depend on subjects I am not familiar with to be reliable as well.

Armed with a few basic facts and references, it is now much easier to use a general search engine to find out what one wants to know and separate the wheat from the chaff. As everyone knows, one of the most difficult things to do when searching the internet is finding the right search terms to use. You wouldn’t look for a restaurant in your neighborhood by just searching the term “restaurants” in Google. That would turn up far too many places to do you any good.

Obviously, to find what you are looking for you must limit your search. By now, most people have at least some familiarity with Boolean search techniques—using the words “and”, “or” and “not” to include or exclude certain results. Most people also probably know to put terms into quotation marks to that that exact term will be searched and not just the individual words. But there are a great many other search techniques as well. I recommend www.googleguide.com for those looking for a list of search methods to help them find exactly what they are looking for on a particular website or across the internet.

Keep in mind that a vast amount of material will never turn up using a general search engine like Google, which tends to skim the surface. Those wishing to go deeper may want to use the so-called “wayback machine” at https://archive.org, which attempts to archive everything on the internet, including pages that have disappeared from their original sites.

Personally, I like searching for information through a reputable newspaper such as the New York Times, which is probably available for free through your local library’s website. Another method is to use Google’s newspaper archives at https://news.google.com/newspapers.