Midd history department v. Wikipedia

You might have noticed that a fair number of the articles in the news feed to the right deal with the Middlebury history department Wikipedia debate (or at least they will — I’m a little behind on the newsgathering because of a lack of internet, and there seems to be a delay between when I post things to my del.icio.us feed and when they show up here). From this, you might have inferred that it’s a debate that is pretty interesting to me both because of my connection with Middlebury and because of my general interest in things related to new media, access to information, and free culture. Some of you have probably heard me talk about it, too, to the point where I started to get the feeling that people are scared to bring it up for fear I’ll get upset. So I’m putting it in the blog, along with links to some relevant coverage and more-articulate arguments than I can make here. Comments are welcome (really), and if you hear me out I promise I’ll post about beaches and caipirinhas or something like that soon. Also, if anyone knows anything that would disprove my guess that Midd students are mostly just ambivalent about the whole issue, I’d love to hear it.

For those of you who haven’t followed the media stampede, the whole thing got started when the Middlebuy history department issued a pronouncement last month that singled out Wikipedia as “suffer[ing] from inaccuracies” and therefore unsuitable for citation (the text is available here at Jason Mittell’s blog, along with some good analysis and a very interesting alternate proposal on Wikipedia use. Full disclosure: Jason was my advisor at Midd . The college put out some sort of press release about it, and it snowballed from there, to (at last count) articles in Inside Higher Education and the New York Times. It’s rare that Middlebury makes the news like this, and for me it’s embarassing on several levels. First, as a former student, I am disturbed by the fact that encyclopedia-citing is apparently so widespread that this debate came up at all. Second, it’s unfortunate that the professors in question chose to take the easy way out by discouraging a useful information tool rather than teaching students how to use it responsibly. And third, that judging from Middlebury’s own coverage of the pronouncement (for example, in MIDDnews, where they bragged about the national media coverage resulting from the decision), the college — or at least its publicity department — apparently sees nothing wrong with this.

Before we start, let’s get one thing straight: there are very, very few people (and I am certainly not one) who would argue that everything on Wikipedia should be taken at face value or used in academic writing without further investigation, verification, and research. Wikipedia can be a tool for gathering information and a starting point for research, but it is not an infallible fountain of truth (if indeed there is such a thing). But just saying that “wikipedia is not an acceptable citation” is not enough. In some cases — in many cases (because why are college students citing encyclopedias of any sort?) — it is certainly true. But singling out Wikipedia because of its “unique manner of compilation” is an unfortunate way to address the larger issue at stake.

It’s true that Wikipedia is (for now) a pretty unique source of information: both uniquely useful and uniquely complicated. But by prohibiting rather than educating, the history department takes the easy way out. A much more proactive solution — and one more in keeping with the college’s responsibility to teach students how to learn, rather than just stuffing them full of facts — would be to help students understand about how wikipedia works, allowing them to decide for themselves whether a given piece of information is reliable, while at the same time clearly stating that they are ultimately responsible for what they write. The ability to gather and cite information and to understand the pros and cons of various information sources is one of the most important skills for any college student or aspiring scholar.

In this context, singling out Wikipedia as unreliable without explaining why seems not only to miss the point of teaching students how to learn, but to be actively counterproductive. If students don’t understand the reasons for the department’s directive (which they are not likely to, unless professors take it upon themselves to “teach wikipedia” and other new technologies by actively integrating them into the classroom) the most likely outcome is not that students stop using Wikipedia, but that they stop citing it — not exactly conducive to rigorous and honest scholarship.

Crucially, it’s the people who don’t fully understand how Wikipedia works who are most likely to misuse it. These people visit www.wikipedia.org and see only the finished product, without understanding the mechanics — the way that pages are built and information is added, the way that sources are cited, the way that assertions are discussed and disputes are resolved, Wikipedia’s guidelines for impartiality and citation, and what goes on behind the scenes, where thousands of dedicated (and arguably slightly obsessive) administrators and editors have contributed to the (at current count) more than 1.6 million articles in the English-language version alone. In other words, thinking of Wikipedia as a finished product is to fundamentally miss the point: one of Wikipedia’s most interesting roles (although not the only one) is as a collaborative conversation about information, rather than a simple repository of facts.

As such, the department’s policy also ignores another indispensable aspect of scholarship: that collaboration and information-sharing is inherent in all research and that it is the responsibility of academics to give back to society. One of the most exciting things about new media such as Wikipedia is their ability to broaden and deepen the abilities of both the academic and non-academic communities to access, understand, and contribute to the expansion of human knowledge. Failing to grasp this — and consequently failing to instill in students a respect for, and feeling of responsibility toward, society at large — is to fail in one of the most important duties of teaching. When Professor Waters (as quoted in the New York Times) found an inaccurate statement in the article on Japanese history, why didn’t he fix it? After all, Wikipedia — much more than most sources of information — is only as good as its users.