If you grew up with a row of Encyclopedia Britannica’s
lining your bookshelf (alas, the final print edition was published in 2010),
using Wikipedia as a source of information seems counterintuitive. After all,
is it really possible for a group of random online strangers to know more about
a given topic than experts employed by the world’s most venerable institution
of knowledge? The answer is yes, sort of.
The secret of Wikipedia is this: groups are remarkably smart.
In fact, they are usually smarter than the smartest person in them. Nowhere is
this explained better than in the book “The Wisdom of Crowds” by James
Surowiecki. He opens the book with a story about British scientist Francis
Galton who, in 1906, attended the West of England Fat Stock and Poultry
Exhibition where he watched 800 people attempt to guess the weight of a fat ox.
Out of curiosity, Galton set out to figure out the statistical mean of the
group’s guesses and discovered that the crowd guessed that the ox weighed 1,197
pounds. It’s actual weight? 1,198 pounds. In other words, the crowd was pretty
much spot on. Versions of this experiment have been conducted time and again,
with results confirming that the crowd will almost always come up with a better
answer than the smartest person in that crowd.
For kids who have never heard of Encyclopedia Britannica and
who readily turn to Wikipedia as a quick and easy reference for their
schoolwork, learning how Wikipedia works, and understanding its strengths and weaknesses,
is an important lesson in 21st century literacy. So we spent a
couple weeks focusing on this topic during our 7th grade CyberCivics classes at Journey School in Southern California.
Every student received a piece of paper with a topic on it,
ranging from spaghetti to running shoes. They were asked to list everything
they personally knew about that topic. After completing this task, they broke
into small groups with other students who had received the same topic. In these
small groups students pooled their collective knowledge and corrected each other’s
mistakes, finally coming up with a list that turned out to be both more
accurate and comprehensive that what they had come up with individually.
Obviously
this is a lesson on “collective intelligence” and an excellent student
introduction to Wikipedia. A terrific article by scholar Henry Jenkins called,
“What Wikipedia Can Teach Us About the New Media Literacies”, accompanies this
free lesson. In his article Jenkins reminds us, “in a world where many young people are turning to
(Wikipedia) as a key source for information, educators need to understand what
is going on well enough to offer them meaningful advice and guidance… it is not
enough to construct policies restricting the use of Wikipedia as a source if we
don’t help foster the skills young people need in order to critically engage
with a site which has become so central to their online lives. ” (p. 14). Hear,
hear.
It’s
interesting really, that so many educators still perceive Wikipedia negatively.
Roy Rosenzweig, director of the Center for History and New Media at George
Mason University, conducted an analysis of Wikipedia for The Journal
of American History, and though he
found the quality of its information inconsistent, he also found that overall
Wikipedia is as accurate or more accurate than traditional
encyclopedias. In fact, a number of studies, including the landmark early study by
the journal Nature, have also
found Wikipedia to be as, if not more, reliable and statistically accurate than a traditional encyclopedia.
Of course,
if you were a 7th grader, you’d already know this, as did the ones I posed the following question to:
“Which do you think is more reliable: Wikipedia or
the old-fashioned encyclopedia?
Their
answers?
“Wikipedia,
because everything is up-to-date and constantly checked. The old-fashioned
encyclopedia is outdated.”
“I think
Wikipedia is more reliable because it’s by people like you and me.”
"Wikipedia,
because it gets corrected all the time.”
"Wikipedia,
because thousands of people are smarter than one person. "
There you
have it. These students, who many consider to be the first of a new generation that has truly
grown up in a hyper mediated culture, instinctively know what scholar Pierre
Levy wrote before they were even born: “Collective intelligence exploits the
potential of network culture to allow many different minds operating in many
different contexts to work together to solve problems that are more challenging
than any of them could master as individuals.” In such a world,
he tells us, "nobody knows everything, everyone knows something, and what any
member knows is available to the group as a whole at a moment’s notice" (as cited by Jenkins, p. 22).
That’s not
to say that students should be taught to take Wikipedia, or any media source
for that matter, at face value. Now, more than ever, young people need to be
taught to call on their critical thinking skills to engage in what Harold
Rheingold calls “crap detection” - a way
to evaluate a source based on the following criteria: Currency, Reliability,
Authority and Purpose/Point of View.
This is one of the many reasons why it’s so important to find time for
cyber civics, media literacy, digital
citizenship, information literacy, or whatever you care to call it, in school. To be a functioning citizen of our new digital world, it’s no longer enough to give the right answer on a bubble test. It requires being
able to find and/or produce credible information that everyone can share. Because
we are why Wikipedia works.
References
Jenkins, H. (2007). "What Wikipedia Can Teach Us About the New Media Literacies." Retrieved from
Lesson and Article: Wikipedia: The Group Behind the Screen
Levy,
Pierre (1997). Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in
Cyberspace (New York: Plenum).
Surowiecki
, James (2004). The Wisdom of the Crowd.
New York: Random House.
