Criterion B: Our edits

After finding a page which we thought contained errors (the Gaia hypothesis), we set to researching it and correcting these potential mistakes. As we found out, there were indeed a few of these which were however not too massive. For example, the article referred to a controversial sentence as only being in one book, but as our research found it was actually included in all of the books.

Here is our modified page which we have yet to upload. The text we removed is striked, what we added is in green and our explanations of why we did these changes are between parentheses in italics.

We also have a source for every piece of information, which we will footnote on the actual Wikipedia page. While changing this article, we came up with three design specifications which should show us that our edits really are making the article better. These are:

1. Every sentence containing some sort of information should have a source.
2. The edited section must be gramatically correct.
3. One week after we upload our edits, our section must not have been majorly edited, as there shouldn't be a need for it if we did our job well.
   

Improving Wikipedia

From our investigation, Suugii and me decided to use template messages to find inaccuracies on Wikipedia. These are little messages that are added by people looking at a page and thinking there might be an error, but not having time to fix it. The advantage of finding inaccuracies using this is that we make use of other users' help, and it also allows us to go through a lot of pages: we just need to quickly scan each article, even ones we don't know a lot about.

Our method is detailed below:

1. Go to the "Contents" page from the main Wikipedia page
2. Choose a category, and then a sub-category. You should be looking at a section containing about 50 articles.
3. Look through each article for template messages such as "The accuracy of this article is disputed," "This article's point of view is disputed," "This article does not cite any references or sources."
4. Check each article or ideally, section, which is marked with a template message. Look up the information for that article/section on the Internet and in books. If you find an inaccuracy, rewrite the section. If you do not find any inaccuracies, simply add reliable sources to help improve the article.

Using our method, we decided to look up the "Environmental articles" section of Wikipedia. It was a controversial topic so was likely to contain lots of inaccurate facts, but the problem was that it was too big - over a thousand articles! These articles were however organized into letters, so we decided to check all of the articles starting with G, which was roughly 50 articles.

As we thought, many of these articles contained template messages, the most common being "This article does not cite enough sources." In many cases, sources were cited but in the wrong format, either linked or put between parentheses instead of footnotes. After some quick scanning, we eliminated all the articles which simply had one or two facts disputed or seemed too hard to research. This left us with about 5 articles, out of which we decided to follow the "Gaia hypothesis." It's a theory about the way living creatures on the planet interact, and the article seemed pretty biased. We decided to look at the Controversy section and try and improve it:

Controversial concepts

This section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (May 2009)

Lovelock, especially in his older texts, used language that has later caused fiery debate. For instance, many of his biological critics such as Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins attacked his statement in the first paragraph of his first Gaia book (1979), that "the quest for Gaia is an attempt to find the largest living creature on Earth." ^[19]

Lynn Margulis, the coauthor of Gaia hypotheses, is more careful to avoid controversial figures of speech than is Lovelock. In 1979 she wrote, in particular, that only homeorhetic and not homeostatic balances are involved: that is, the composition of Earth's atmosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere are regulated around "set points" as in homeostasis, but those set points change with time. Also she wrote that there is no special tendency of biospheres to preserve their current inhabitants, and certainly not to make them comfortable. Accordingly, the Earth is a kind of community of trust which can exist at many discrete levels of integration. This is true for all multicellular organisms which do not live or die all at once: not all cells in the body die instantaneously, nor are homeostatic "set points" constant through the life of an organism.^{[citation needed]}

This part contained a lot of weasel words (unclear statements), seemed rather subjective and did not cite any sources so we thought it likely to find a factual inaccuracy in it.

Wikipedia contributors. "Gaia hypothesis." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 18 Feb. 2010. Web. 23 Feb. 2010.

Investigation - how does Wikipedia work?

For the next part of our investigation, we were grouped in pairs and have started actually working on our group project: creating a method of finding inaccuracies on Wikipedia and correcting them. The first thing we need to do is understand how this giant online encyclopedia works. Here are the questions we are investigating.

Where does Wikipedia get its information?
Wikipedia gets its information from pretty much any internet user out there. Anyone can log on and add to the pages: where they get the information they add is very varied. Some get it from other websites, books, lectures, personal experience...the latter is obviously not considered as good as other sources, as Wikipedia tries to stay neutral and personal opinions tend to be biased. After every statement on a Wikipedia article, there should be a little number that links to a footnote at the bottom of the page.

Who is in charge of deciding what goes into an article and what gets removed from an article on Wikipedia?
Basically, anyone can add to an article or remove from it, so all users are in charge of this. However, this can easily lead to what Wikipedia calls edit warring: this is when two or more users disagree on what should be on a page, and repeatedly revert the page to the last version that they wrote in order to cancel the other users' changes. The rule is that if someone reverts the same page over three times in 24 hours, they must be reported on the "Notice Board." This is a page where anyone can add the names of people who they think are violating the rules of editing. The administrators of Wikipedia, users who actually work for the website and are payed for this, regularly check the Notice Board and the infractions listed there. They can choose to ban the users for a period of time, or simply issue them a warning.

If there is a debate about whether a particular bit of information should or should not be included in an article, what is the process for deciding?
Every page on Wikipedia contains a "talk page:" if people don't agree on what should be on a page, they should discuss it on this page until they reach a consensus. Usually, most problems get settled through simple discussion but sometimes the dispute escalates. In this case, anyone involved in the dispute can ask for a mediator on the Mediation Request page. Mediators are a group of users on Wikipedia who have been given this role because of their strong contributions and their desire to help make the website better. They are voted each year by the users of Wikipedia and form the Mediation Committee.
After someone makes a request for mediation over what should be on a particular page, a mediator will supervise a discussion with everyone on the talk page and decide what should be on the page after a few days. This discussion is final: if one of the users keep adding or removing content when the mediator decided he/she shouldn't, the user may be banned.
If there continues to be dispute over the article, which is often the case with controversial pages such as "Abortion" or political views, the administrators of Wikipedia will usually lock the page. This means no one can edit the page without it going through the administrators, so only helpful content will be added. Of course, the reverse side is that helpful edits take a long time to get online, as the administrators have to check every single one. This is why only really controversial topics are locked.

How reliable do you think Wikipedia actually is?
I already thought of Wikipedia as a rather reliable resource, but after completing this first part of my research I think so even more. It's not just a website where people "add" information that may not always be correct; there is actually a fully-fledged editing process, and people who are dedicated to removing the errors on the website. On the discussion pages I looked at, the discussion was polite and the users were really trying to agree on what they wanted to put on the page.

How would you know whether a particular article really is accurate?
It's really is a matter of personal judgment, in most cases: if the article is well-written, doesn't use "weasel words" that are intentionally vague such as "Some people say...", seems pretty neutral in tone and doesn't present any crazy information, you can usually trust it. Less qualitative factors that might help you decide if an article is reliable would be:

• Are there lots of works cited? Are these works reliable sources such as books, government publications, etc.?
• Have there been lots of edits? Trust the "wisdom of the crowd" - if many people visit this article, chances are that it's getting better by the day.
• If you check it up on the internet, do the facts seem to match up?

Since checking all of these would take a lot of time for each Wikipedia page you use, most people will at first base themselves on personal judgment and then check up sources/edits/other websites if they are in doubt.

How would you go about discovering whether a particular article contains inaccurate information?
The most certain way would obviously be to look through the entire article and check up every fact against some trusted sources, such as books or encyclopedias. This would result in a very accurate encyclopedia, but more often than not you won't find too many errors, so it might be a waste of time. It's better to quickly look through the article, and only search statements that seem a little "off" - there's more chances that people will lie about the political views of an actor than his date of birth, for example. Wikipedia also has a built in manner of looking for errors called template messages. If you see a fact that doesn't have a source, for example, but don't have time to correct that, you could simply add [citation needed] next to it. This way, you indicate to other users trying to correct inaccuracies that they should probably look up this fact before other, less suspicious ones.


Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 22 July 2004. Web. 17 Feb 2010.

Our own wikis on PBWorks

Before delving into Wikipedia itself, we started off our Wikiality unit by creating our own wikispaces on a website called PBWorks. These were public, so in theory anyone could edit them, but in practice only the people in our class did. That still made for much more changes than I would've expected!

To create the wiki itself, I worked with Ha Young and Brooke. This was surprisingly easy: we just went to PB Works, entered my e-mail adress and a password. After that we were taken to another page which asked us how we wished to name our new wiki, and tadum - we had our own workspace. Of course, it was empty, but it was still surprising how little time it took to create one. Absolutely anyone can become the administrator of one, there's no identity check or moderation. In a way that is great because it allows anyone to enrich the web; on the other hand, there's something powerful about being anonymous on the internet.

After that, we copied the script of my fictional podcast on the wiki and let people change it, and put a little note at the top that asked if anyone could help us "improve the script"... to be honest, the edits weren't really aimed at making our script better but more at having fun. Here are a few of the not-so-helpful changes that were made (whatever is crossed was removed and whatever is in green was added):


Changes in reading
Name: Dorthella
Age: 15
Gender: Girl old enough
Cultural background: Dorthella lived in England from the time she was born to her twelfth birthday, after which she moved abroad to Mongolia. Culturally, she considers herself British, but she has travelled a lot and would like to believe she has an “international culture.” She is the second eldest in a family of three. Her little sister is turning nine and her older brother is in his sophomore year of university. Racist
Education: Dorthella goes to ISU, but she has also been in a boarding school and a typical school back in England. She isn’t sure about her career path yet, but is considering teaching. She is somewhat of a good student, but has other interests. Homeless
Hobbies, interests: Dorthella loves reading and writing stories, as well as “hands and crafts” activities.

***

Name: Dorthella
Age: 15
Gender: Girl
Cultural background: Dorthella lived in England from the time she was born to her twelfth birthday, after which she moved abroad to Mongolia. Culturally, she considers herself British, but she has travelled a lot and would like to believe she has an “international culture.” She is the second eldest in a family of three. Her little sister is turning nine and her older brother is in his sophomore year of university but she dropped out of high school because of a rare condition called "Uglymonia".
Education: Dorthella goes to ISU, but she has also been in a boarding school and a typical school back in Haiti. She isn’t sure about her career path yet, but is considering profesional boxing. She is somewhat of a good student, but has other interests like pole dancing.
Hobbies, interests: Dorthella loves reading and writing stories, as well as “hands and crafts” activities. I also llove shopping <3>


These edits actually did make me laugh at first, but I can see how in a more serious website such as Wikipedia people fooling around like this would be less than helpful. And even though most of the edits were negative, there were also some contributors that took it as their mission to rectify false information. I had people change SMS languages others had added to proper Englsih, others add indentation and such things. However, no one really helped improve the script's content or dialogue - they only changed the grammar.

I found out about all these different types of edits by going through the "Recent Activity" section, which provided a very helpful "Show Changes" function. Using it, you could see precisely which user changed what and when, and also revert back to any previous versions. That's what I did at the end of our unit, as n0ne of the changes were really helpful. I guess in this case the whole wiki side to our script ended up being pretty useless, and the idea of having everyone access the page was not beneficial to its quality.

However, we were also in a special context: we're all teenagers, and we knew we were editing the work of our classmates and friends. The people on Wikipedia are obviously more concerned about the quality of their work than we are. From this experiment, I would say wikis are a useful tool if there is someone behind to moderate the pages and make sure useless changes such as "PrincessGirl20391 was here! LOL!" are removed. But if the pages are simply left "out there" for anyone to edit, without another person behind supervising the information, there are more people who will be tempted to add silly edits than people who will actually improve the wiki. I think the main thing about a wiki is that it must be made of a community of motivated people. Teenagers would actually keep a page on a TV show or a book serious, for example.

Here are some applications for wikis our class thought of:

• Advertising
• Fan group
• Surveys
• Support groups
• Debates
• Writing a book together
• Keep a record of your conversations
  

Wikiality

Our new unit is about "wikiality", and this new form of websites wikis are. Wikis are websites that can be edited by anyone. They were created by an individual who might have put up some content, but mostly information is added by people using it. Anyone can click a page, on dinosaurs for example, and add information by simply clicking an "edit" link. They're a very convenient way of finding information as the text is usually clear and simple to read, and because of their nature they are regularly updated. As time goes, there are more and more wikis, usually FAQs for websites.

But the most famous out there is by far Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. This huge website contains tons of information on the most various topics, and is written just like an encyclopedia. There's always a large debate on whether or not it is a reliable source that can be used for school work. Wikis can be edited by absolutely anyone, so people are often afraid that the information you find on them might be wrong. It's true that any internaut out there could write a new page on Wikipedia without having any knowledge of what they're writing about, and give you false information for your research. But a study demonstrated that the percentage of errors on Wikipedia was the same as that of the Encyclopedia Britannica, considered to be one of the most reliable encyclopedias out there! So...can it be used as a reliable source?

This is what we will be trying to decide throughout our new unit, by examining various Wikipedia pages looking for mistakes on them - and correcting those mistakes to make Wikipedia a better resource. All the while, we will be able to evaluate how many errors really are on Wikipedia and how often they are corrected, to make our own opinion on whether or not wikis are a reliable source. The way we view information is changing as fast as the Internet is changing, and Wikipedia is most likely going to be an important part of our future, so it is important we find out more about the way it works. We can then help build a better, more reliable internet, and a more convenient way of sharing information.

"Wikipedia Logo."NFJAW. Wordpress. 2007. 02 Feb 2009