Right and wrong

Charlotte Hsu, Las Vegas Sun

Friday, Nov. 2, 2007 | 7:38 a.m.

One of the 21st century's great quandaries is that so much of what we rely on we don't actually trust. Neither the water we drink nor the food we eat. Neither our computers nor our Internet providers. Neither our insurance companies nor our medical practitioners. Neither our TVs nor our newspapers.

But how could we trust anything? Every day we drown in a tidal wave of information, much of which tells us that whatever we just decided is wrong. Or not exactly right.

Certitude is so last century.

And Wikipedia, the research resource for this era, is a sanctuary of uncertainty. The online encyclopedia is often the first place people go for information everyone knows might be wrong. Or not exactly right.

This is troublesome for college and university professors, who rely on journals that publish peer-reviewed and - approved information but who also teach students who like to cite Wikipedia as a source in research papers.

Since anyone can contribute articles, and throngs of users, in theory, can quickly identify and correct mistakes others create, even Wikipedia posts an introductory warning.

"Older articles tend to be more comprehensive and balanced, while newer articles more frequently contain significant misinformation, unencyclopedic content, or vandalism."

With fall semester well under way, professor s from each of Southern Nevada's three public higher education institutions reviewed and shared their thoughts on Wikipedia articles on topics they knew well. And they offered a warning that relying on the Web site can be dangerous.

Lester Tanaka, who teaches a college success course at the College of Southern Nevada and is pursuing a doctorate in educational psychology at UNLV , evaluated a Wikipedia entry on "creativity."

Although Tanaka found a lot of good information in the article, he took issue with the introductory sentence, which defines creativity as "a mental process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations between existing ideas or concepts."

"How can we accept this definition?" Tanaka said. "There's probably a good 20 different ways of looking at creativity."

Parts of the article seemed to contradict one another - not surprising, Tanaka said, given that a single entry often contains input from several authors.

Just a few paragraphs from the opening sentence defining creativity is a line that says psychological literature contains more than 60 definitions of the subject.

Tanaka thought the article was disjointed, covering topics from the history of creativity to thinkers in the field without transitions that could strengthen readers' understanding of how each component of the article related to others.

Ralph Buechler, chairman of UNLV's foreign languages department , found entries on emblems, the Berlin Wall, W. G. Sebald and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to be well structured. He also found no errors.

"It's pretty good," he said. "It's pretty straightforward."

Although Buechler had stumbled upon Wikipedia on occasion while surfing the Web, reading these four articles was the first time he had explored the online encyclopedia in depth.

"I was pleasantly surprised at the expanse of some of these articles," he said.

What Wikipedia lacks, though, is a book or journal's ability to conduct an exhaustive review of existing knowledge and weave the old arguments with new ones, Buechler said. And Buechler and Tanaka, along with Tony Scinta, chairman of social sciences at Nevada State College, said academic journals enforce a rigorous peer review process that makes them more credible than Wikipedia.

Scinta discovered that a Web site for Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance and other sources he didn't recognize were listed as sources in a Wikipedia article on subliminal messages. Some of Wikipedia's assertions are followed not by a citation but by the words "citation needed."

Tanaka noted that in the creativity entry, some of the most respected experts in the field are cited scarcely , if at all.

Scinta reviewed entries on subliminal messages and the implicit association test, a psychological tool often used to gauge people's prejudices.

Scinta said while the articles at times failed to address multiple sides of complex issues, most information was accurate. The only error he found was in the subliminal messages article, which he says misidentified part of a 2000 presidential campaign TV ad as a subliminal message.

Despite concerns about Wikipedia's credibility, Buechler, Scinta and Tanaka think the site can play a role in learning.

Buechler said one of Wikipedia's advantages over traditional texts is that links within articles provide instant access to sources cited and information on people and ideas mentioned.

Students can use Wikipedia to begin exploring a subject, although other sources should be consulted too, Buechler, Scinta and Tanaka said.

Overall, Scinta said , using Wikipedia is a gamble. The encyclopedia contains bad and good information and relies on questionable and credible sources.

Although some online entries are solid, others are shallow or wrong, said Scinta, who requires students to use publications that are reliable on a consistent basis.

He said that although he " can't just go off the handle and say it's a complete joke," he doesn't allow students to cite Wikipedia.

"Sometimes they try, and it makes my stomach turn," he said.

Tanaka said that although he doesn't ask students to redo papers in which they cite Wikipedia, he questions them about the site's validity and warns them that professors "ding" students for referencing it.

Although Wikipedia has shortcomings, Scinta said the two articles he examined are "better than nothing" for people who can't afford subscriptions to materials students and researchers use. He wonders if academics have a right to be upset about Wikipedia if they don't make journals and other resources available to the public .

Most experts are busy and would rather spend time on work for which they receive credit than on correcting Wikipedia's inaccuracies, Scinta said. He added that only something he viewed as an "insult to knowledge and humanity" would prompt him to consider revising an entry.

Wikipedia has democratized the pursuit of knowledge, an endeavor that in the past was confined to elite circles of intellectuals who published thoughts in peer-review ed journals, Tanaka said. Even reputable scholars can have trouble persuading top journals to publish unpopular or unusual ideas, he said.

"Wikipedia (offers) everybody a shot at putting stuff in," Tanaka said. "The problem is, how do we know if that's true? That that information is reliable?"

Regardless of what academics think of Wikipedia , the people's encyclopedia is out there.

Google "Berlin Wall," "creativity," "emblem," "Goethe," "implicit association test," "subliminal message" or "W. G. Sebald" and the subject's Wikipedia entry surfaces as the first or second result.