Wikipediatricians -- what a concept!

Caught an interesting post from Dr. James McGrath and his blog "Religion Prof". Professor McGrath is Clarence L. Goodwin Chair in New Testament Language and Literature at Butler University in Indianapolis.  While his blog isn't one you might think I read regularly, it certainly is.  I find his posts thought provoking, and this one certainly is:  "Wikipediatricians and Ways of Knowing".

Let's talk about Wikipedia for a moment.  I use it often and have also run up against criticism of it, usually from people who don't like their policies.  Yes, unlike what some people would like to believe, you just can't publish anything you want on Wikipedia.  There are processes, editorial policies, and rules that apply no only to those editing information, but what information can be included.  In other words, just like Encyclopedia Britannica, there are processes that must be followed.

For some background, I grew up with two sets of encyclopedias in the house and many an evening you could find my siblings and I huddled over one volume or another compiling information for school.  When I was in grade school -- even high school, I rarely questioned the encyclopedia.  However, once in college I used an encyclopedia reference in a paper just once and you would have thought the world had ended from the reaction of the professor.

That's where I got my first lesson in what an encyclopedia really was, a compilation of research, not an authoritative source -- and that you have to go to the source material for understanding.  While they are generally regarded as acceptable knowledge, when it comes to actual research and references, they are second or even third-hand information.

As a result, when I first saw Wikipedia, one of the benefits I saw was the live links to the source material supporting the articles. but I was curious as to how it stacked up against the gold-standard of encyclopedias "Britannica".  What I have found is that Wikipedia does have a slight bias to the left, especially in pages concerning corporations and governments, but, in my opinion, it wasn't a significant bias -- which may relate to my own biases; however, in scientific/technical subjects, it was as accurate as Britannica.  In some ways it is more current than a published encyclopedia because the editing is much more recent. Of course Britannica is also available online, but the currency issue still leans in favor of Wikipedia.

In 2005 Nature did a study comparing the two and found that all-in-all, they were pretty much on par as information sources:

"In the end, the journal found just eight serious errors, such as general misunderstandings of vital concepts, in the articles. Of those, four came from each site [Wikipedia and Britannica]."

Nature didn't mention any bias, but Forbes did later in a 2015 study -- but like me didn't see it as significant.  In fact one of the findings I found fascinating in the Forbes study:

"Perhaps the most interesting finding of Zhu and Greenstein's research is that the more times an article is revised on Wikipedia, the less bias it is likely to show—directly contradicting the theory that ideological groups might self-select over time into increasingly biased camps."

Yes, the most times an article is edited, the less bias is present.  Which I find very interesting since the groups that seem to whine about Wikipedia most often are groups with an ideological bone to pick, as noted in Wikipedia deserves an Award! They Annoyed the DI! Yea!.

OK, back to Professor McGrath, now that you know where I stand on Wikipedia itself.  It's not the source of information that may be problematic, but, as he puts it:

" . . . a failure on the part of readers to understand how summaries relate to the processes whereby academic conclusions are drawn."

Encyclopedias, whether print or online, are simply summaries from a wide variety of other source materials.  They are compiled by writers and editors that probably do not have the same level of expertise as the original writers.  That doesn't mean encyclopedias should be discarded.  What it means, especially in this environment of distrusting experts and the Internet's apparent democratizing of every opinion, we still need to understand that our own perspective is limited and that any single individual or group might understand some things differently than we do.  We need to grasp those not just as limitations, but as strengths.  I am not a doctor, so a doctor's medical opinion is going to be better than mine . . . and equating such expertise to an unsupported opinion on the Internet can be both dangerous and foolish.  Multiple doctors opinions would weigh even more heavily.  That's how it should be!

Like Wikipedia. the best information seems to be when it is confirmed by multiple reliable sources.  I am not talking about when all Fox News talking heads agree, but if Fox, CNN, and MSNBC are presenting similar stories, you can more than likely rely on them.  But when one source is leaning hard in one direction and the majority of the other news sources have an opposing view, you can be pretty sure the one is 'showing their slip', so to speak.  As you look at a variety of sources, you will come to find ones that tend to be more objective than others, like MSNBC and NPR over Fox News or Breibart.  But you have to experience multiple sources to figure that out.

Academic consensus, including scientific consensus, isn't the voice of one person, but the collaboration and confirmation by multiple people with a particular expertise.  If you distrust it, you always have the option to examine the source of the material yourself.  Wikipedia makes it easy, as does Google.  But do not let your perception be stuck in a rut with one source.  Branch out, you might learn something!

One of my friends is a hard-line conservative, and as the years have gone by become much more conservative than I am comfortable with.  His favorite news sources include Fox, Limbaugh, and a few specific websites.  When he tells me anything, I head out and check carefully.  As much as he will dislike reading this, I usually find his information to be biased to the extreme and often outright wrong.  Sometimes it's just a little twisted, but all too often it's simply a lie.  He doesn't seem to like it when I call him on it and he gets rather defensive -- OK more than just 'rather defensive'.  But until he figures out his usual sources aren't particularly honest, we will keep playing this game.

But therein lies the problem.  He has very few sources of information and gets told by those sources that any other sources are 'fake news', and he buys into it.  He's not learning anything, all he's doing is getting reinforcement for his own prejudices.  That's the dangerous point.

It's not Wikipedia that's a problem, but how we take information, regardless of source, and use it.  Are we learning or are we reinforcing beliefs we already have? Are we getting information from authoritative sources, or are we assigning our own form of democratizing and thinking authoritative sources and alternative sources are equal?  A doctor v. Hollywood celebrity on vaccines?  A spokesman paid for by the oil companies v. actual scientists who study climate change?  A biologist v. a lawyer?

You really need to think about who is more likely to give you good information rather than tell you something you might want to hear!