Wikis and accuracy

Just thought this was rather timely news in Wiki Week of Learning 2.0 and thus would share.

Virgil Griffith, an almost-grad student at CalTech, has developed a tool that tracks down the IP addresses of people who edit Wikipedia entries. Apparently the tool has already shown up some unsurprising biases, such as Wal-Mart editing entries on Wal-Mart, someone from Diebold (manufacturer of allegedly faulty voting machines in the US) editing the entry about their allegedly faulty machines, the CIA edited entries about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. PCWorld has a reasonably comprehensive report here. And according to the prestigious blog The Huffington Post, Fox News have been doing the same thing.

This doesn't really change my overall opinion of Wikipedia as an information source: it can be a useful place to start getting an overview of things, but you can't necessarily trust it, particularly on political issues or anything controversial, because you don't know who's edited what or what their biases are.

The thing is, this isn't that much different from traditional forms of publishing. Publishers of newspapers, books, encyclopedias and journals may all have their biases, from an organisational level down to particular columnists or contributors. Part of becoming a good researcher is learning how to evaluate the accuracy and bias of information, how to read between the lines and detect an agenda or predisposition, to evaluate based on whether authors attempt to present both sides of an argument or admit conflicts of interest. In some ways, Wikipedia may actually be an improvement because at least tools like Griffith's offer a modicum of transparency, for those who care to pursue it.

And that has always been the case—that misinformation propagates because people don't consider the source, they don't consider issues of bias or accuracy, they don't always question what they read or are told. From Shakespeare's slandering of Richard III to the Tonypandy Riot of 1910 to one of my personal favourites, the urban legend about people swallowing eight spiders in their sleep every year (there's a great story about the origin of that particular myth), the spread of false information shows that a convincing untruth, especially if it captures the imagination, will survive longer than the truth.

Question everything. Assume nothing. Use Wikipedia for what it's worth. But boycott Fox News.