“I don’t dock points for students who use Wikipedia, but I might ridicule them for it,” MacDermott said. “Students still need to take [Wikipedia] with a grain or salt.”
Yaacov Lawrence, an assistant professor in Thomas Jefferson University’s Department of Radiation Oncology in Philadelphia, examined 10 types of cancer and compared Wikipedia’s information to statistics in the National Cancer Institute’s Physician Data Query, a peer-reviewed oncology database.
About 2 percent of the information from both web-based resources differed from textbook sources, Lawrence found. Lawrence used algorithms to judge the readability of each cancer entry, and based on word length and sentence length, the Wikipedia entries were much more difficult to comprehend.
Two University of Denver instructors last year had the campus’s journalism students writing Wikipedia entries as part of a curriculum that stresses online writing and content creation as readers move to the web en masse.
Students in the university’s Media, Film, and Journalism Studies Department composed 24 Wikipedia articles in 2010, covering everything from the gold standard to San Juan Mountains to bimettalism, an antiquated monetary standard.
Wikipedia’s leaders assured the audience that the website’s reputation is strong — no longer drawing the ire of teachers and journalists claiming that its entries are unreliable.
“Making fun of Wikipedia is so 2007,” Gardner said to a cheering crowd, quoting what a French journalist recently told her.
Even so, Wales said Wikipedia must be used with care.
“Particularly be careful if we say ‘the neutrality of this article is disputed,’ or ‘the following section doesn’t cite any sources.’ That’s probably a good warning,” he said.
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