[Air-L] using wikipedia articles in academic paper

[Thomas Coles]

Hi everyone, thought I'd jump in,

Wikipedia is a great resource, I like to think of it as representing the
'state of the art' in the original sense, an ideal Wikipedia article would
be a explanation of a subject as it is understood and verified at any one
time. Its very close to a CVS in this way; we are downloading the curent
accepted form of the article.

However this is where problems in referencing arise, its more of a
philosophical/process problem. If Wikipedia is attempting an aggregation of
human knowledge (as all encyclopedias are) then it is at best a mild
abstraction from primary sources and original research and at worse
one-sided or incorrect. Wikipedia's standards state a fact or statement it
is in a wiki article then it should be supported by a reference (that this
is often not the case is one of the great problems). When there is a
reference it is that which should be cited (and read!), when there are no
references you can't rely on the information. Wikipedia is not a voice or an
opinion, it is an aggregation.

So back to Stefano's problem, I suspect that your reviewer has a
well-developed suspicion of Wikipedia, possibly irrational, but probably for
good reason. The line is that academia is built on verifiability, and many
people take the view that what is being created is a grand project along the
lines of the Principa Mathematica, or a Unified Theory of Everything, and
don't wish to allow any opinion or fuzzy thinking into criticism. All rather
delightful Englightment thinking isn't it?

Wikipedia becomes a major fault line in these sorts of projects if we begin
to rely on it. On purely pragmatic lines, it is only 8 years old after all
and I suspect the worry that many have is this: despite the fact you can
reference static versions of pages, what happens if the site disappear? Will
the structures of criticism built upon it goes down with it? The traditional
methods still seem to function, i.e. there are hundreds of big buildings
full of dead books spread over the globe, and the chances are in a few
hundred years a few copies of texts you have referenced might still be
around. I'm not advocating putting hard copies of Wikipedia in libraries (as
a German version has done), the exciting features of Wikipedia are the same
as its troubling features; it changes constantly. Proof and verification is
conservative, I'm not sure how this will change.

Even if you think this aggregation function is useful, surely it risks
becoming a method of hiding all manner of sins. A sort of intellectual
'collatorized debt obligation'. As others have said, Wikipedia is a tool,
not a foundation.

So in response to giving definitions to terms or impenetrable acronyms, well
as Christophe said, leave it to the grown up reader to inform themselves.
They may well go straight to Wikipedia anyway, as it is currently arguably
the best way to get informed quickly; but that may not be true in 5, 10, 20
years. Hopefully any article has a longer period of relevance than that.

This isn't to say that all digital content is worthless. There are more
digital depositories, distributed around safe data-centres around the world
(a library is surely just a data bank) so that there is a reliable source
for non-dead tree work. I think retention is one of the biggest problems
that will face the archivers of the 21st Century, and a lot more work needs
to be done here. In the meantime the groupthink where I am seems to be that
wikipedia is yet to prove itself and shouldn't be referenced. I said that
Wikipedia is a encyclopedia, but maybe it isn't, maybe it is trying to be
something completely new?

Anyway, thats my take on it,


Tom Coles
University of Glasgow