Why Wikipedia Should Be Trusted As A Breaking News Source
Most any journalism professor, upon mention of Wikipedia, will immediately launch into a rant about how the massively collaborative online encyclopedia can't be trusted. It can, you see, be edited and altered by absolutely anyone at any moment.
But how much less trustworthy is the site for breaking news than the plethora of blogs and other online news sources?
Even Moka Pantages, the communications officer for the WikiMedia Foundation, said she agreed with this sentiment when she spoke this morning at the South By South West festival in Austin, at a panel entitled "Process Journalism: Getting It First, While Getting It Right". Here's the thing - we have to say that everything she said before answering this question seems to say otherwise.
Update: We got a chance to sit and chat with Moka Pantages today and she took a moment to clarify that she was specifically referring to students using and quoting Wikipedia in research papers. We apologize for any misrepresentation of her stance. Here is her clarification:
I absolutely believe Wikipedia is a good, trustworthy source for contextual news and information and should be used by everyone, including students, as a resource. When I was asked during the panel whether or not Wikipedia should be accepted as a source for college papers, it was my opinion that, just like any other encyclopedia, I don't think it should be cited as a reference source. However, I do think it's a great starting point for students to start their research and begin to understand the topic or issue they are writing about.
Tackling Real-Time Content
The panel featured journalists from the New York Times, SeattlePI.com, Journerdism.com and Gizmodo and a common theme was that user-created content - whether tweets, YouTube videos, or otherwise - could and should be used in breaking news coverage. The panelists all agreed that this content should be verified in some way and should be presented to the audience with a high degree of transparency.Each panelist spoke about a specific case study - the New York Times' coverage of last summer's protests in Iran, for example - and discussed how they gathered crowd-sourced information and attempted to verify its authenticity. Robert Mackey, the reporter for the New York Times, gave examples of translating chants heard in YouTube videos and matching up street signs that flashed on screen with Google Maps. Once he was sure of its validity, he said, he would add it to the coverage.
"When you're sitting in an office in New York and you're trying to confirm that something was shot in Tehran that day was actually shot in Tehran that day, you're not going to be able to verify that," he said. "The idea is that it's a conversation on the web about this event."
The Newsroom Moves Online
Monica Guzman, a reporter for SeattlePI.com, spoke similarly about her website's breaking coverage of a shooting and the subsequent day-long man hunt. SeattlePI, formerly a print publication, has existed solely online for nearly a year now. Most of the breaking information that day, she said, came from Twitter."The media collaborated with itself and it was one big swirling newsroom on Twitter," said Guzman. "We ended up using tweets as starting points. And Twitter did end up breaking a bunch of stuff."
While SeattlePI was able to send reporters out and verify some of the information in person, how was the rest of it verified? "Common sense," she answered.
The Seattle Times, she said, had more than 500 people collaborating on Google Wave to gather information on the same story.
Wikipedia Takes On The Mumbai Terror Attacks
Then came Pantages' turn to discuss how the Wikipedia community addressed the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai. While it is said, as we started out with, that Wikipedia just shouldn't be trusted, the case we heard for its coverage of a breaking news situation far surpassed what you might often see on your average blog or even traditional newspaper.One particular user, Kensplanets, was a driving force behind the coverage, using breaking news from IBN.com as a source. In cases such as this one, the crowdsourcing aspect not only allows multiple points of view, but also allows aggregation from multiple points in a number of different languages and locations.
"It's not just U.S.-centric information," Pantages explained, "You have the New York Times, Reuters, Times of India - they're all there."
According to Pantages, by the end of the first day of the Wikipedia article's life, it had been edited more than 360 times, by 70 different editors referring to 28 separate sources from news outlets around the web. While this could seem like a situation rife for misdirection and misinformation, the constant discussion swirling around the creation of an article, Pantages explained, is "really similar to what you would think should be in a newsroom." Nonetheless, we still disparage Wikipedia as an untrusted source of news.
Wikipedia As News Aggregator
Just like other news aggregation services, Wikipedia takes many sources and puts them in to a central location, but with the added benefit of human curation instead of algorithmic collection."There's no real-time reporting going on in Wikipedia, it's real-time aggregation," Pantages said.
So the very first level of information vetting, which happens at the reporting level, has already taken place by the time it reaches the site. Then the hundreds or thousands of editors continue to scrutinize the information, discussing edits and potential changes in the back channels. The news we read in our daily newspapers, on the other hand, is curated by only a small number of people. Surely, there is the question of qualification, but many of Wikipedia's contributors and editors are, themselves, professionals.
In contrast, we often accept news from other blogs as immediately trustworthy, while a Wikipedia article such as this one, which is transparent in its creation, its sourcing and its transmutation over time, we dismiss as flawed from conception. Today, the 2008 Mumbai Attacks article sits at more nearly 43,000 words with over 150 different sources cited and 1,245 unique editors.
While Pantages argues that "Wikipedia should not be a source, it should be a starting off point," we would have to argue the same for news media in general. In this crowd-sourced news environment we've entered, blindly consuming news and content, from any source, is an ill-advised path to follow.
With that said, if we are willing to take crowd-sourced content - whether tweets, Facebook updates, blogs, videos or whatever else - as valid sources for information about our world, then a collection of these same media as carefully poured over and curated as found in a Wikipedia article should be even more trusted, not less, than those bits on their own.
Traditional media get bits of breaking news wrong all the time, but we accept that as part of the game. To vilify Wikipedia for the same errors sets unequal standards and besides, you'll likely never see the same level of transparency in traditional media about where it went wrong. With Wikipedia, it's all laid bare for the world to see.
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You'll get no arguments from me on this one. From the books and articles I've read on the subject, it's clear that there's a good deal of quality taken from so much quantity. Your point about traditional news sources getting it wrong on occasion is well taken.
Wiki Of Mind Destruction
'Nuff Said
I find wikipedia a better resource for researching the growing history of a given subject. But I have added content to wikipedia only to have it removed for no apparent reason. The content curator kings on wikipedia are very selective on what should appear on their pages.
I think blogs are much more open and allow many more voices to be heard. Who decides which story is correct? Only when you have multiple voices heard can you decide on your own opinion of the truth. I vote for more open means of communication and the continuing move towards civilian journalists.
-Dan Cote
Founder of http://www.YourLocalBlog.com
(A Hyperlocal blogging network)
"In this crowd-sourced news environment we've entered, blindly consuming news and content, from any source, is an ill-advised path to follow."
exactly, it's just part of the game.
"Getting It First, While Getting It Right"
thanks RWW,
since i'm just a passive listener.i've a new lesson from here.
Wikipedia is not driven by ratings. What more needs to be said?
It s not ibn.com, it is ibnlive.com
PR firms have been using Wikipedia for marketing and market manipulation for years. Wikipedia's culture of protected anonymity makes the site ideal not only for deliberate leaks to build buzz, but also astroturfing through planted operatives who pretend to represent ordinary people. There's been cases already of attorneys editing Wikipedia to be favorable to their client's interests, then citing the very articles they'd edit in support of their client's case (which is why citations to Wikipedia are now banned in at least one federal circuit). A political operative of a British national political party managed to inveigle himself into Wikipedia's dispute resolution body, where he had the power to ensure that anyone who tried to change the articles his party cared about would be stopped.
Wikipedia is rapidly becoming yet another vehicle through which mass media manipulators do their dirty work; the only reason it's not as obvious as it is elsewhere is that Wikipedia's aggressive culture of protected anonymity makes it far easier for them to conceal their actions.
The moral of the story is, don't trust anything you read on Wikipedia. You have no idea who wrote it, or why. And Wikipedia doesn't want to you be able to find out.
@Kelly And the old guard has been using the pillars of mainstream media to push their agenda for ever. Then again, I wholly agree with Chomsky on the filters of media...
I think the argument here is a bit unclear.
What Wikipedia does in the context of breaking news is aggregate and summarize other (presumably reliable) information sources.
Because Wikipedia is, in this context, a summary of other news sources, Wikipedia should be trusted not for its own content, but rather for the news sources it cites. Wikipedia is, in this context, a tertiary resource.
I think Wikipedia can be trusted as a breaking news source insofar as one follows (and for that matter can follow) the breadcrumbs to verify it), but the fact remains that its reliability hinges upon the sources getting it right.
If there's something to be said for Wikipedia here, it's the synthesis of multiple sources into a cohesive summary. One particularly useful feature might be noting when the sources used contradict one another.
In honor of Wikipedia and in light of the stance that ReadWriteWeb has taken on this issue, I will not be clicking any of your advertisements, ever.
I hope you enjoy the wonderful world of volunteered "free culture"!
...Suckers!
Thanks for the detailed and thoughtful commentary/summary of the panel. In light of the stance that ReadWriteWeb has taken on this issue, I will be clicking on your advertisements, if only as a counterpoint to Mr. Kohs. ;)
I just wanted to point out that if Kelly's commentary above sounds disgruntled, it's because she's a hardcore and experienced Wikipedian. Obsessives like us tend to get burn out dealing with dumb PR folks, so I think that it's important for people to take her comments with a (small) grain of salt. Wikipedia isn't perfect, but it doesn't take a great deal of poking around to notice it's about 10 times as transparent as any other major website in its class.
Not sure Wikipedia is the right outlet for this since it is intended to be an encyclopedia, but much has been written about news aggregation in the form of a wiki such as WikiCity Guides (www.WikiCity.com), or my personal favorite analysis: http://newsafternewspapers.blogspot.com/2008/09/why-not-wikify.html
I heart wikipedia
I'd agree that for some ''events'' Wikipedia can be a useful aggregator during or immediately following the event. It's a lot less useful in many cases after the fact, partly driven by the culture, and partly driven by the rules applied.
During an event there is an almost indiscriminate capture of sources and information, leading to a fairly clunky article and little assessment of the actual value of much of that information. A lot of the information collected may be of limited use, or only tangentially related. The attitude tends to be ''never mind the quality, feel the width''. That's probably fair, it's not the time to make qualitative judgements.
As activity reduces the majority of editors move on, leaving the article in the hands of a few. Some of those will polish and polish while others will manage the substantive content.
Going back to an article after six months to try to improve it becomes a thankless task, the content may have been manipulated to support a position, it may have become cluttered with lots of trivia. Frequently the use of language is clumsy and the structure horrendous. But critically assessing the sources, re-writing and improving is a painful activity. A statist mentality seems to dominate, material is left because ''it's been there for six months'' so it's stable, the rules around sourcing are aimed at the lowest common denominator, rubber stamping tabloid journalism that then gets regurgitated as gospel, caveat and nuance are excised in favour of a ''tit for tat'' style of writing.
Essentially it's useful as a route to material, but skip straight to the references section of any article, rather than reading it.
I totally agree with both Dan Cote and Kelly Martin. By experience, I can tell you, anyone can change any of the articles posted. I work in a R&D medical field and I have posted an article about a new device that will help relieve certain paralyzing conditions. The article was referencing to white papers written by world recognized specialists in their related field of medical expertise and clinical trials experience. Once posted, this article was first attacked as being some form of astrosurfing (which was not). Then the content was butchered by reviewer that had no medical knowledge (some admitted that they Google the subject to create their own knowledge base to use for the review. The article present on the Wikipedia is now providing wrong info. Worst for me, I cannot correct without having this guild to reset the errors they are writing in. The worst mistake I ever made is to post an article. Never again.
@Kelly Martin. PR manipulation of the web collective thinkng is a dirty secret that most people silently ignore. There are companies that pay people to post product favorable entries in blogs. There are collective web sites of individuals that are paid to post PR articles provided by companies as if the information is original research. And most readers are gullible enought to blindly accept the information as truth.
The readwriteweb article brings out the the advantage wikipedia has over most others collective wisdom sites: the wikipedia editors. I place more trust in wikipedia over something like the Washington Times (founded by Sun Myung Moon) BECAUSE of the editors.
Wikipedia is an excellent STARTING PLACE. You get the general idea, then you know what to research from more reliable sources.
Anyone who uses ANY single source as absolute cannon is someone who has no credibility to cite sources in the first place.
Don't damn all of us academics - even with the caveat most :)
Wikipedia is like any source. Trust it as much as anything until you can check the content.
But I agree with the rest of the article.
Back in 1998 I discussed this kind of problem in my not-yet-a-blog post at Harlan Ellison versus the Crazy Yenta Gossip Line. You may not have seasoned reporters and editors covering the news on the Internet, but in exchange you get tremendous transparency. Wikipedia turns this up to 11.
*sigh*
That link in the previous message is scarydevil.com/~peter/io/harlan.html ...
We could never cite Wikipedia in news columns or essays when I was going to college. But I've found for the most part that the information is accurate.
It seems the best route would be to put warning labels on all media: http://recentchanges.info/?p=40
Kelsey - my lecturers say the same, but I know, that they use it too;)