Open Source

The first piece I will post I have had sitting on my laptop for a littl eover a week. I wrote it after listening to the third installment of "OpenSource", a new public radi oshow that is being podcast as well. If you haven't checked it out yet, you should.

I listened to the third installment of OpenSource radio the other night and it brought up some really interesting, if not new criticisms of Wikipedia and really the internet in general. The two main criticisms could be boiled down to the following. Firstly that unscrupulous students would copy and paste information from Wikipedia, and other websites without properly citing it. The second was the fear that because of the open nature of Wikipedia (anyone can edit entries anonymously) that the validity of the information was suspect and that individual users were being mislead regarding the validity of the information in Wikipedia.

One the first point there is certainly something to be said for students misrepresenting ideas and text as their own. The internet does seem to make it easier as well. After all you only need to google your subject then copy and paste the bits you like into your word processing application and you are done. In the past I would at the very least have to retype the information. However, won’t there always be an arms race between teachers and plagiarizing students and doesn’t the internet provide teachers with new tools to find these copycats out. A quick google search turned up this for example. Beyond that I just don’t find the plagiarism argument very convincing or interesting.

The second point is where the meat of the debate exists. It essentially was that because Wikipedia is “authored” by many anonymous users the veracity of the information is too questionable to be considered anything but a novelty. I am not sure if the guests who were advocating this position have visited Wikipedia but I can’t say that I agree entirely. I have used Wikipedia as a starting point to learn about many different subjects both technical and not and as “Jimbo” said it serves the purpose of a good encyclopedia which is to give a short primer on a given topic. In addition, for those topics surrounded by some controversy, you can start to get a flavor of the different sides around the debate. As with a traditional encyclopedia article, stopping when you are done does not make you an expert and certainly should not be your only source for a paper.

Since it is anonymously authored encyclopedia it can contain bad information, placed there maliciously or otherwise. I agree with that. What I don't agree with is the conclusion that this type of information source is less useful because of that.
Think about some of the "authoritative sources of information we have used for a long time. The New York Times for example, is the paper of record and yet Jason Blair was able to fabricate stories and pass them off as true.

Perhaps one of the largest lessons the internet can present to us is that all information should be treated with a certain amount of skepticism. Certainly some sources will be more trustworthy than others but true information literacy may require that we be prepared to deal with the most questionable of sources and by doing so we best exercise our critical thinking skills and become better consumers of information.

I think this show will provide ample material to vamp on so I'm thnking I might do this regularly with this show. Unless it turns out to be too much work