As librarians, it is almost second nature for us to devalue Wikipedia. Frequently we remind students that Wikipedia is not a tool for research. We harp on students not to cite Wikipedia in their academic work. We cite famous examples of Wikipedia’s inaccuracy.  We prop up the straw man of an undergraduate turning in a paper full of Wikipedia citations and the sea of red ink from the professor that awaits. All of this is well-intentioned and important, and I agree that Wikipedia should not be used in formal academic work. In my work in an academic library, I often warn students against the danger of relying on Wikipedia, and I stringently refuse to allow them to cite it in academic papers.

However, I’m concerned that we librarians (and many academics in general) are missing the point in our all out war against the crowdsourced encyclopedia. First of all, it should be recognized that we are likely overstating the case about the inaccuracy of Wikipedia. Countless studies have been conducted asking about the accuracy of Wikipedia, and for the most part, researchers have concluded that it’s far more accurate than our public decrial would suggest, with some suggesting that it’s just as accurate as other reference works. This is particularly the case for heavily-edited articles, where one sees the value of a lot of eyes on a small amount of content. That Wikipedia is not so inaccurate as we might suggest is even clearer when one considers the false standard to which we hold it. The rhetoric about Wikipedia as inferior to more traditional reference sources suggests that those traditional sources are themselves infallible, given that they are produced by the credentialed experts. However, anyone who has worked closely with reference materials in a particular field will admit how uneven and at times inaccurate even these print resources can be.

But it’s not the under-appreciated accuracy of the tool that suggests to me that we may be doing a disservice to students by dissuading them from considering it a tool of the academy. Rather, in leading people away from Wikipedia, we are shielding them from seeing the shifting paradigm of knowledge that a tool like Wikipedia represents. By understanding just how different the philosophical underpinnings of a crowdsourced encyclopedia is from our traditional reference sources, we miss a real opportunity to teach our students something about the construction of meaning.

I want to outline two reasons I believe Wikipedia can be an effective pedagogical tool. First, it crowdsources our knowledge base and allows the community to serve as a check on individuals’ arguments. The primary reason so many of us are against Wikipedia (and other tools like it) is that we are operating from a top-down understanding of data and information. That is, we understand information as something that is in the realm of the credentialed expert (there’s a bit of job security behind this idea, don’t you think?). In the traditional mind of the academy, reflected in the decrying of tools like Wikipedia, information is something that the rest of you must only passively accept, because you really don’t know what you’re talking about. Leave it to us, the people writing reference articles based on our long years of study to report what you need to know. For example, if I want to know who fought in the Spanish-American War, I should turn to a reference work written by someone with the appropriate degrees in 19th-century American history and ask him or her (though traditionally it has been “him”) what happened in that war. But who is to say that this particular historian that I chose knows what he is talking about? Or who is to say that he’s telling me what actually happened and not his idiosyncratic take on things? Where’s the check on his information? Perhaps it comes in reviews from other scholars, but those can be difficult to track down, difficult to follow, and sparse in their coverage. What if there were a place where the description of the war was under the scrutiny of everyone who knew something about that war? Wouldn’t we tend to trust the explanation of the war that had been vetted by millions, rather than one that had been vetted by one (or one and a team of editors), even if most of those millions didn’t have advanced degrees? Surely we are not there yet with Wikipedia, but you can see how important the democratization-of-knowledge model it is built upon can be. Just as open-source software has the benefit of a powerful user and editorial community, so open-source information like that found on Wikipedia has the power of millions of checks upon it. We are in an incunabulum period with this paradigm of knowledge, but it is certainly where we are heading. A roomful of opinions is going to be more accurate than a single opinion, so long as we can bring enough well-intended voices into the room to cancel out all the crazies. We’re not there yet with Wikipedia (hence the famous inaccuracies), but I think we’re headed in the right direction. The fact that the more heavily-read articles on Wikipedia tend to be the more accurate ones suggests that this crowd-sourced information world is the way to go. Wikipedia is not perfect, but I am concerned that in decrying it we are missing the boat on the paradigm shift that it represents.

A second benefit, closely related, is far more interesting to me, and it is one that I’m only beginning to appreciate. A tool like Wikipedia, because it is crowdsourced, reveals as problematic the traditional hierarchy of data, information, knowledge and wisdom. In the traditional view (and this is far more complex than I can represent here; check out the Wikipedia article on it!), there is objective data that can be gathered by the experts. Information is a set of inferences made based on that data, or the organization of that data into meaningful conclusions. Knowledge is the synthesis of information in a given context; the subjective interpretation of information in particular situations for particular purposes. Wisdom, then is the future-looking application of knowledge, an even more subjective rendering of the data, filtered through several subjective levels. In a traditional view, reference sources like encyclopedias are understood to function as data organized into information. That is, reference works present a somewhat objective set of data, organized and described. In traditional encyclopedias, this information was presented as objective fact, verified by the credentialed individual who was asked (and often paid) for his/her expert analysis. Because there was very little check on the information (essentially an editorial check by someone who was not as specialized the expert writing the article), the reference work presents an article as the objective information with which a reader can do whatever he or she wants. That is, knowledge and wisdom can be created from the information provided, given the context in which the reader lives and works or the particular purpose for which he/she reads. A crowdsourced encyclopedia, though, pulls back the curtain on this process and shows that there is no such distinction between the “objective” information and the subjective construction of knowledge and wisdom based on that information. Because the information is constructed socially, and because the process of that construction is transparent (we can see the editorial history and read the dialogue surrounding that history), we recognize that there is no “objective” data, regardless of the credentials of an expert providing it. Rather, all data and information is subjective, the product of the perspective and context of the data collector. In fact, if we operate under the DIKW hierarchy, we might ask whether the first few layers of the hierarchy are even possible. If the post modern turn has taught us anything, it has taught us to be suspect of truth claims made, particularly those made by individuals. The presence of a community, explicitly operating from a particular (and different!) contexts, shows this messy process, even when trying to report the most “objective” data. It is revealing, for example, that basic “facts” about the life and presidency of George W. Bush are so vigorously debated. This shows us that even trying to present “data” is a subjective act. So I welcome Wikipedia, because it does the hard work of showing us what many late 20th and early 21st century philosophers have been telling us: all is subjectivity.

So, am I going to start suggesting that people use Wikipedia in research? Well, no, but yes. That is, I stand by the informal librarians’ creed that Wikipedia is not a scholarly source. There is a distinction between the article on “St. Paul” on Wikipedia and in the Dictionary of Biblical Interpretation. I recognize that citing the Wikipedia article is going to be met with much red ink. So, don’t do it. However, I do think using Wikipedia as a pedagogical tool is important, and I’m concerned that our refrain of “don’t use Wikipedia” is costing our students a valuable opportunity to catch a clear glimpse of the shifting paradigms of knowledge that are reflected in such a tool. There are tangible benefits of using Wikipedia in the classroom. First, it gives students a forum to present their work and make real contributions. The ideals of Web 2.0 are noble ones; we are all creators and we all have something to say. This is difficult for students to recognize, as they spend much of their time working on artificial assignments that will rarely be seen by a set of eyes other than their professor’s. Using Wikipedia in the classroom can give students an opportunity to contribute, to be part of the world’s construction of knowledge. Second, though, is it shows students how meaning is created. It cautions against the far-too-common assumption that a) there is objective data and b) only the experts really know it. Though Wikipedia is not perfect in any way, it moves in the right direction. It is built on the post-modern understanding that all meaning is constructed. It allows us all, therefore, to serve as the arbiters of that meaning. I don’t feel qualified to be a sole arbiter on much beyond my narrow field of training (and even then I’d be a bit cautious). However, I do believe that alongside millions of others, I can come to a pretty fair consensus on what happened, what it meant, and why it’s important. So I encourage teachers to use Wikipedia. Don’t use it as a singular source of information (though again, it’s not a bad one). Rather, use it as a publishing platform and a teaching platform. Encourage students to edit and create entries, hold an edit-a-thon, make a student assignment the assessment of the history of a wikipedia article, or do anything else to get students to see how this paradigm is shifting. For goodness’ sake, at least read this prescient article by Roy Rosenweig (from 2006!) about the benefits of this tool.

The millions in the room will never agree on even the most mundane piece of data, but that’s the beauty of it. We can see the conversation as it happens and see before our eyes the truth of ideas like that of Paul Ricouer, who reminds us that no event has meaning until it is put into context with other events, and that process is a subjective one dependent upon the whims and desires of the one doing the contextualizing (not sure who Ricoeur was? Look him up on Wikipedia! [but check some of the sources in refereed publications!])