Near the top of the prompt I give my students when I assign research papers is a prohibition: “Due to the uneven quality and reliability of its entries, Wikipedia may not be cited as a source in your paper.” Such limitations on students’ use of the world’s largest encyclopedia are common in academe and supported by a growing number of scholarly books and articles that highlight the contradictions inherent in this vast collection of specialized entries written principally by nonspecialists and edited by no one and everyone.
Wikipedia U: Knowledge, Authority, and Liberal Education in the Digital Age
By Thomas Leitch (John Hopkins University Press)
Thomas Leitch, director of film studies at the University of Delaware, observes in Wikipedia U that more than any other information source, Wikipedia has been the target of attacks on its veracity, which, he points out, are really questions about the nature of scholarly authority. Those questions expose not only problems of popular collaborative sources like Wikipedia, but, more revealingly, similar paradoxes inherent in academe.
Authority is something academe seems to have long mastered, with its elaborate systems of citation, credentialing, institutional reputations, peer review, and professional hierarchies. By relying on anonymous collective authorship (which is pretty close to no authorship at all), Wikipedia has been whacked with abandon by its academic critics. While educators express legitimate concerns about Wikipedia’s structural susceptibility to slipshod scholarship or plagiarism, many of those criticisms are fundamentally anxieties about how Wikipedia threatens academic authority.
Leitch’s innovation is to spin the table in both directions: He uses the values of higher education to expose the contradictions of Wikipedia, but he just as deftly employs Wikipedia’s ethos to expose the paradoxes of liberal education’s own claims to authority. That authority is built partly on the rigid hierarchies that valorize and preserve certain forms of knowledge, but equally on the institutional encouragement to undermine expertise with new research and interpretations. Academic authority appears solidly rooted in sources, but such authority largely depends on the frequency with which they are cited, which is a social arrangement.
Wikipedia touts itself less as an invention than as a communal, democratic power whose mission, according to its co-founder, Jimmy Wales, is to afford “free access to the sum of all human knowledge.” But Wikipedia’s democratic approach to authority raises the problem of all knowledge being flattened into a vast plain where no landmarks rise above the terrain. That danger is compounded by one of Wikipedia’s advantages over printed compendiums—its unrestricted depth and reach. The physical limits of pages and volumes enforce the testing of importance and relevance. On Wikipedia, Constantine the emperor, Constantine the comic books, and Constantine, Mich., can be equally noteworthy, discussed at similar length and depth.
Over time, Wikipedia has apparently perceived that reality as a potential weakness and has slouched toward hierarchy. Entries are now designated as “featured” or “good” and graded as A through C on down to the lowly “stub.” Not all contributors are of equal standing, and autoconfirmed editors, “sysops,” “bureaucrats,” and “stewards” have been given different editing powers.
Academe also imperfectly balances the competing values of settled authority and critical questioning. The Encyclopaedia Britannica is biased toward stability; its authority rests on expert reliability, not on self-questioning. Wikipedia embraces the opposite, staking its authority on a principle of relentless expansion, which theoretically carries with it a unique ability to rapidly adapt new knowledge and correct mistakes.
While encouraging broad democratic participation, Wikipedia actually has a more institutionally conservative approach to debate, having many structures in place to overcome and resolve controversy but few to encourage it. While much academic debate lives in the shadows, with peer review and credentialing—from dissertation defenses to tenure decisions—transpiring in secret, Wikipedia, through its “Talk” pages, where editorial deliberations and “revert wars” rage, hangs its laundry proudly out in public.
But Wikipedia’s greatest disjuncture with liberal education—and what academics find so threatening—is its substitution of the wisdom of the crowd for expertise. Unlike other academic critics of Wikipedia, who are mostly silent about the philosophical problems of expert authority while bashing Wikipedia for its celebration of amateurism, Leitch underlines the contradictions and paradoxes involved in liberal education’s reliance on credentialed experts. Academic authority is based on mastery of a field, but the continual expansion of fields renders mastery impossible except in ever-narrower specialties.
In this sense, Wikipedia and academe are opposites, the one prohibiting original research (on the principle that only secondary sources are generally verifiable) and the other following the rule of publish or perish, an imperative to research that leads to the paradox that students be taught a body of conventional knowledge by instructors who are working to undermine it.
Wikipedia’s framework rests not only on democratic ethics but also on the principle of crowdsourcing, or the wisdom of the crowd—the phenomenon, first described by Francis Galton, that the median of a large number of independent estimations of a fact closely approximates reality. That effect, in part, is what makes the relatively large number of users and contributors to Wikipedia an argument in favor of its authority, in spite of the fact that, according to Wikipedia itself, a quarter of its contributors are under the age of 21, and more than a third do not hold college degrees.
Though focusing on Wikipedia for most of his book, at the end Leitch observes that Wikipedia is just one example of the rapidly shifting nature of authority in our social-media-saturated society. Compared with the increasing Balkanization of a hashtagging, tweeting, self-referential world, Wikipedia seems almost hidebound. In fact, Leitch urges liberal education to embrace Wikipedia as a counter to the accelerating atomization and flattening of knowledge and authority over all.
There is no ultimate solution to these problems of epistemic authority, only more or less appropriate grounds upon which to base a critique of new forms of knowledge. Leitch persuasively argues that academics have plenty to correct in their own backyard before criticizing their Wiki neighbors: “Given the surprising gaps between the principles the academy invokes to justify its strictures against Wikipedia and the principles implicit in its own practices, it seems unwise, perhaps impossible, for academics to make a case against Wikipedia based on their own institutional principles, some of which Wikipedia shares.”
So what is an expert to do? Leitch falls back on pedagogy as a guide. Rather than treat Wikipedia as a useful pariah, Leitch calls for a policy of “playful” engagement. Wikipedia, because of its open architecture, the transparency of its internal debates, and the obviousness of its strengths and weaknesses, is an excellent pedagogical tool for teaching about the nature of authority and knowledge. Directing students to participate in writing or editing Wikipedia entries develops several online-literacy skills, Leitch says, although he is on the fence as to whether “crap detection” is one of them.
