Sunday, September 9, 2012

The Ethics of Wikipedia


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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