Up until last month, I have shamefully used Wikipedia as my principal source of information for everything from tissue subculture to tennis rankings. I, like many of my peers, had great faith in the open-sharing format and truly believed editors and reviewers would rapidly weed out any fallacies in the published information. Much to my disappointment, this was not the case.
As I was finishing an internship at Novartis this summer, my final project entailed creating a poster to summarize my work. To find some background information, I performed a Google search and clicked on the first link I saw- a Wikipedia article. Never thinking to double check the accuracy of the article, I included the information in my poster. The next day when I presented my summer work, the judges immediately looked at the poster and pointed out that the Wikipedia information I had included was an outdated and false opinion. I was shocked: could my trusted Wikipedia have actually provided me with false information?
As I think about it more, the greatest advantage of Wikipedia, the ability of anyone to add/ edit anything, is also its’ biggest drawback. As far as I know, the article I read about Darwin’s theory of evolution could have been written by a proponent of the Church of Scientology, or Tom Cruise himself. The problem with open-sharing is that many times it allows opinion to override fact. Posting information has become just as much about politicizing an opinion as it is about providing an accurate account. And when this politicization gets out of control, people like John Seigenthaler have their names slandered and jobs put into jeopardy.
As I learned from my Novartis poster, most contributions to Wikipedia are poorly researched, if they are researched at all. Often times, the accuracy of an article will depend solely on one website from which the contributor obtained the information. As a result, a substantial amount of information on Wikipedia is highly biased, has many gaps, or is just plain wrong. Furthermore, texts for articles in Wikipedia are often directly copied from other websites. And due to the open format of Wikipedia, no copyright holder can do anything about this.
The Wiki generation has created noise and chaos, not knowledge. Previous Encyclopedias contained precise information that was well researched by trusted sources. Wikipedia, on the other hand, contains a large amount of errors and superfluous facts. While I agree that Wikipedia is a good source for general knowledge, it should never be trusted as a primary source for information and should be recognized by its users as an unreliable and untrustworthy reference.
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