Fair enough, but I hope I may press a point that's actually slightly
different than the one that was identified for rebutting.
I don't disagree with Kevin Hardwick that Wikipedia cannot serve as an
"excellent academic reference resource," or with Kevin Gutzman that "you're
far less apt to find errors of basic facts in academic publications," or
with Paul Finkelman about "the danger of using a source that has no
scholarly oversight." That's why I acknowledged in the first place "that
serious scholarship requires serious peer review," and it's why I mentioned
scientists, who are of course scholars themselves. (I had in mind in
particular an eminent physicist and historian whom I've heard energetically
disdaining Wikipedia.)
But I note that everything so far in this message has only to do with formal
scholarship, not that that's not to be expected in a scholarly forum. Still
it seems to me important to stand up for what Wikipedia represents in the
Internet age for society generally -- the very realm that historians study.
Just this morning I included the following paragraph in an online
science-and-the-media column that I submitted about science sensationalism
in a major newspaper:
QUOTE
Concerning Ridley’s climate-consensus disbelief, Wikipedia reports that in
October 2011, when delivering the Angus Millar Lecture of the Royal Society
of the Arts Edinburgh, Ridley said, “I see confirmation bias everywhere in
the climate debate. Hurricane Katrina, Mount Kilimanjaro, the extinction of
golden toads – all cited wrongly as evidence of climate change. ... A theory
so flexible it can rationalize any outcome is a pseudoscientific theory.”
UNQUOTE
Now, if I were seeking to publish that statement, containing those quoted
words, in an academic journal, I'd overcome the barrier to my
fact-checking -- can't find a transcript -- by spending an hour listening to
the audio that was placed online by the Royal Society of the Arts
(http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-events/2011/angus-millar-lecture-2011-scientific-heresy).
But I already know that the quotation represents Ridley's general view. So
even if Wikipedia gave me some flawed quoting -- and again, I would check
the quotations if I published them academically -- a possible misquotation
isn't especially harmful for my evanescent journalistic purpose.
Nor is the argument that I'm making here irrelevant to scholars, for many in
my audience at Physics Today Online are scientist-scholars. But at the
American Institute of Physics, they're not paying me to do scholarship.
They're only paying me to do media analysis and advising and to contribute
science-and-the-media columns. First draft of history, and all that.
But please look at the two overlaps with real scholarship:
* the subject of the column is sensationalism about formal scientific
scholarship, and
* the audience for the column includes scientist-scholars.
It's only journalism, but it matters for the scientists who pay me. And
without the gambling that I can do -- cautiously -- on Wikipedia, I don't
think I could serve my clients well enough. I'm just a science writer with
deadlines. More broadly, I think you can find lots of other instances when
crowd-sourced Wikipedia serves good purposes, albeit imperfectly, in an age
when Internet crowd-sourcing has important potential, whether or not for
scholarship directly. I would never tell a young science writer not to use
it at all.
Concerning all of that, Professor Gutzman used the loaded adjective
"trendy." He mentioned "current trendy theories about the wisdom of
crowds/insight of wikis." I don't disagree that it's trendy, and I don't
disagree that scholars and scientists must be especially careful about the
evolving phenomenon. But if scholars take that cautiousness too far, I
wonder if they might stumble into vulnerability to another loaded adjective:
stodgy.
Thanks.
Steve Corneliussen
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