The Teflon Encyclopedia
February 22nd, 2007I love articles that criticize Wikipedia, because they invariably end up resulting in improvements.
Consider the latest article (which is actually fairly well balanced, despite the sensationalist headline):
A History Department Bans Citing Wikipedia as a Research Source
The story is pretty predictable—a professor noticed an error repeated in several of his student’s papers, and tracked it down to a Wikipedia article on the subject. Cue academic freakout, and then the university bans citations of Wikipedia.
(Hmm, I seem to remember encyclopedias not being valid resources for citation anyway…)
But that’s a tired old story, we’ve seen it before.
What’s interesting to me is what happens after these articles go up. Publicizing errors just makes them go away.
Let’s take a look. Here’s all we get in the article (I guess the NYT has its own policy of not linking to Wikipedia?)
When half a dozen students in Neil Waters’s Japanese history class at Middlebury College asserted on exams that the Jesuits supported the Shimabara Rebellion in 17th-century Japan, he knew something was wrong. The Jesuits were in “no position to aid a revolution,” he said; the few of them in Japan were in hiding.
He figured out the problem soon enough. The obscure, though incorrect, information was from Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopedia, and the students had picked it up cramming for his exam.
So presumably the article in question is called “Shimabara Rebellion.” Right? I haven’t actually looked yet, I will right now. It will be at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shimabara_Rebellion
The NYT article is datelined yesterday (I’m not sure exactly what time of day). Let’s see how many edits the Wikipedia article has had since then:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Shimabara_Rebellion&action=history
20 edits later, the problem is solved. An except from the article’s talk page:
The offending sentence from the article was (now deleted):
- ..the rebels themselves were backed by the foreign power of the Jesuits and the Roman Catholic Church.
which is in fact accurate, but ambiguous. The students at Middlebury took it to mean physical backing (troops, supplies, money, etc..) which is wrong - when the original author (I assume) meant it to mean the Jesuit’s were “rooting” for the rebels to win (obviously). Just a case of poor writing on Wikipedia, but the facts were not wrong. With that said I support Prof. Neil Waters in not allowing Wikipedia, or any encyclopedia, to be cited by history students - professional historians don’t cite encyclopedias. — Stbalbach 05:19, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
Notice that the article in the NYT did not address the nature of the error itself. It did not point out the ambiguity in the statement. It simply jumped on the simplistic ZOMG AN ERROR.
But whatever. Wikipedia has an immune system… apparently Middlebury College doesn’t?
