Do you know how to ''wiki?'',
By Charles Miller

This week I offer yet another follow-up on an earlier column. The online encyclopedia at www.wikipedia.org has recently become the center of controversy. This incredibly popular website is a recent phenomenon that has now come under fire from academia.

For those readers who might be unfamiliar, Wikipedia (“wiki” is a word for “fast” in the Hawaiian language), is a vast and growing online encyclopedia to which users may contribute.

Users have so far contributed over two million articles while other users serve to edit and fact-check the entire body of work. Anyone is permitted to edit the content of Wikipedia, although many pages are locked to prevent competing positions from constantly changing certain pages.

I read in one article about how President Hoover had traveled to Cuba in 1928 on the battleship Texas. Well, my granddad was a US Navy man who could give eyewitness accounts of such events. From him I knew the Wikipedia article was wrong. I checked my facts against the US State Department website and my book on the history of BB35. Then I went back and corrected the Wikipedia article to read that it was President Coolidge who sailed to Havana on the USS Texas.

That is the way it’s supposed to work, but unfortunately not all contributed material is accurate. The novelist Colin Bateman described how his son had added “Mr. Bateman is currently suffering from penile dysfunction” to his father’s biography. He good-naturedly took pride that his young child had correctly spelled “dysfunction.”

Encyclopedias used to be written by teams of academics and so it should come as little surprise that Wikipedia is now under assault from academia.

“It’s dangerous when the internet is littered with opinion and inaccurate information which could be taken as fact.” says Eleanor Coner of the Scottish Parent Teacher Council.


A history professor in Vermont noted that several students repeated the same error in exam papers; then discovered that same error on Wikipedia. A number of institutions of higher learning have allegedly banned their students from using Wikipedia, although it is not clear how such a ban could be enforced.

Wikipedia can be found to say such things as “there is an overwhelming scientific consensus that global warming is a reality.” That was obviously not written by any of the large numbers of scientists who do not believe global warming is a reality. Each side of the global warming argument has its own theory; each side has its own zealots who accuse the other side of not telling the truth.

Prior to the internet, there was academic dissent among the writers of the encyclopedia, but they always “agreed to disagree” and presented a neutral view. Absent this peer review, Wikipedia has become the eye of the storm on many issues because this website is a popular public forum where those with an agenda, conspiracy theorists, vested interests and crackpots can express their opinion.

What is missing here, among both students and other internet users, is the development of interpretive skills. Anyone can post anything on a website; and it does not have to be accurate. Everyone should accept that they need to fact-check important information before accepting it as truth.

There is a great deal of misinformation all over the net.

Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant, a frequent visitor to San Miguel since 1981 and now practically a full-time resident. He may be contacted at 044-415-101-8528 or email FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.com.