Anyone who works in Education at any level has probably got
a few stories to tell you about students using Wikipedia as the primary source –
or occasionally the only source – of information on a report or writing
assignment, even though the site’s occasional issues with the truth are widely
known. The editorial board does its best, but given the number of volunteers
contributing to Wikipedia there will inevitably be cases where personal bias of
a political, philosophical, religious, scientific or spiteful nature results in
errors being accepted or retained as correct. This has resulted in some embarrassing
– and potentially actionable – mistakes, and has come close to knocking the
site off the Internet more than once…
Probably the most outrageous of these errors are the cases
where an artist or scientist is denied permission to edit the entry about his
or her own work, on the grounds that they are not a credible source on things
they have created. This came up again this past week, when American author
Phillip Roth was told that Wikipedia did not consider him a credible source
regarding the origins of a book he had actually written. Roth responded with an
open letter about this fiasco in the New
Yorker, and somebody was apparently willing to accept that article as a
second confirmation of story – possibly because the magazine would have
hesitated to run the open letter if the allegations it contained were not
verified – because the Wikipedia entry has been corrected…
Now, the point has been made several times that this policy
isn’t as farcical as it sounds. Without some kind of independent fact-checking
there would be nothing to keep a discredited scientist from changing the facts
of a Wikipedia entry to indicate that his theory had been right all along, for
example. We’ve already seen cases of political parties and candidates altering
both their own entries and ones about their opponents in order to improve their
chances of election, and there’d certainly be no reason to suppose that
authors, filmmakers or commercial firms wouldn’t alter information about
themselves in order to increase sales, regardless of the truth or falsehood
involved. Unfortunately, there have also been cases where one or more Wikipedia
editors have allowed their own personal biases to cloud their judgment,
resulting in citations of scientific research being deleted in order to uphold
a personal or political point…
Clearly, Wikipedia has a responsibility (legal and ethical)
to try to present the most accurate information available, especially because
despite all evidence to the contrary, people at all levels of age and education
are going to take what they read on the site as absolutely correct. In cases
where scientific fact is in question, or the details of an event (public or
private) are in dispute, it’s hard to argue that a second (or third) source of
confirmation is a bad thing. But when an artist presents his or her actual
thoughts about a work, or a scientist provides his or her actual data and
calculations, it’s even more difficult to say that an editor who can’t possibly
have an understanding of that work that approaches that of the person who
created it should have the authority to override (or delete) the opinions of
the creator. This leads me to an ethical question that is not as simple as it
initially appears:
Does Wikipedia (or any other online source) have an ethical
responsibility to allow the creator of a specific work of art or research to
have the final say on the meaning and interpretation of his or her own work? If
so, how are they to prevent edits made for self-serving purposes, and
particularly ones that intentionally distort the facts? If not, how are they to
prevent edits that directly contradict not only the original work but also the
creator’s efforts to correct the entry? In the case of any disputed fact the
editors could certainly request third-party confirmation of basic facts, but
this will almost certainly result in cases where the editors and their subject
matter are at odds with yet another set of bias and belief. Or should the site
allow all information that isn’t directly contradicted by other available
sources to be entered, possibly with notations where the disputes occur, and
allow visitors to the site to make their own decisions?
It’s worth thinking about…
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