Wikipedia in the news: 14 April 2008

(As you may know, I write the “In the news” sec­tion for the Wiki­pe­dia Sign­post. From this week onwards, I’ll be post­ing up the ITN sec­tion on my blog as well as hav­ing it pub­lished in the Signpost.)

Pro­fessor says Wiki­pe­dia crowds out expert knowledge

Wiki­pe­dia breeds ‘unwit­ting trust’ says IT pro­fessor — Deakin Uni­ver­sity asso­ci­ate pro­fessor Shar­man Licht­en­stein believes that the increas­ing use of Wiki­pe­dia cre­ates blind trust in inform­a­tion, to the det­ri­ment of valu­able know­ledge and expert opin­ion. She says that Aus­trali­ans already dis­respect intel­lec­tu­als and aca­dem­ics, but she asks us to con­sider whether we would use a trained brain sur­geon or a stu­dent who has just read Wiki­pe­dia for brain sur­gery. She notes that Wiki­pe­dia prides itself on being built by groups of lay cit­izens, and experts are unlikely to con­trib­ute any­way because they would expect to be paid. Cred­ib­il­ity of Wiki­pe­dia art­icles is ques­tioned because of the form­a­tion of “elite” edit­ors and admin­is­trat­ors, a trend that has caused grow­ing dis­sat­is­fac­tion with Wikipedia’s edit­or­ial pro­cess, lead­ing oth­ers to cre­ate com­pet­it­ors to Wikipedia.

Other men­tions

Other recent men­tions in the online media include:

• Wikipedia’s Zealots — An editor who receives per­sonal com­mu­nic­a­tion about a scientist’s views on global warm­ing edits Wiki­pe­dia to include these com­mu­nic­a­tions but is rever­ted by other editors.
• Sci­entific cita­tions in Wiki­pe­dia — The pat­tern of cita­tions on Wiki­pe­dia is com­pared with the Journal Cita­tion Reports, which counts journal cita­tions; Wiki­pe­dia is increas­ingly using struc­tured cita­tion markup.

[As pub­lished in the Wiki­pe­dia Sign­post]