There’s great debate in the Internet world about Wikipedia. I don’t know to what extent its administrators can control the content from all its contributors, but when I’ve had reason to consult it on familiar topics, to check a date or a book title, I’ve always found it well done and well informed. But to allow collaboration from anyone whatsoever has its risks, and people have sometimes found themselves wrongly accused of certain acts or even misdemeanors. When they have protested, the entry has been corrected. At one time the page relating to me contained an inaccurate biographical detail. I corrected it and the error is no longer there. I also found an interpretation, in a summary of one of my books, that I felt was wrong: the entry suggested that I had advanced an idea about Nietzsche when in fact I disputed it. I changed “develops” to “argues against,” and this correction was also accepted.
But I’m not at all happy about the situation. Somebody could interfere with this entry tomorrow and suggest the opposite of what I have said or done, perhaps as a joke, or out of malice or stupidity. There again, since it’s rumored on the Internet that I am the well-known hoaxer Luther Blissett, even years after the authors of those pranks have come out and revealed their true identities, I could be scurrilous enough to go around tampering with entries on authors I don’t like, accusing them of plagiarism, pedophile pasts, or links to the Daughters of Satan.
It’s argued that, as well as editorial control, there’s a self-correction, so that sooner or later someone will identify and correct false information. Let’s hope so, but clearly there is no absolute guarantee, as we have with a wise encyclopedia editor who compiles all the entries and accepts responsibility for them.
Yet the case of Wikipedia raises little concern in comparison to another serious problem of the Internet. Along with reliable sites created by competent people, there are bogus sites, developed by blockheads, nutcases, or Nazi subversives, and not all Internet users are able to judge whether a site can be trusted.
This is of major concern for education, since many pupils and students don’t bother with textbooks and encyclopedias, and they take information straight from the Internet, and to such an extent that I’ve been arguing for some time that the new core subject for the school syllabus ought to be techniques for selecting information online. Yet it’s a skill that’s hard to teach, since those who teach are often as unprepared as students.
Many educators also complain that when young people write a research paper, they copy what they find on the Internet. If they’ve copied from an unreliable site, it has to be assumed the teacher realizes they are writing drivel, but when it comes to specialized subjects it’s difficult to establish immediately whether a student’s arguments are false. What happens if a student chooses to write a paper on an author of marginal importance, about whom the teacher has only indirect knowledge, and the student claims the author wrote a particular book? Would the teacher be in a position to state that the author had never written that book, which would mean carefully checking the various sources for every essay, and he may have dozens to read?
There again, the student may present research that seems, and is, correct, but has been cut and pasted directly from a website. I tend to regard this situation as less serious, since copying well is not a simple art, and a student who knows how to copy well is entitled to a good mark. Besides, before the Internet, students could copy from a book they’d found in the library and the issue was the same, even though more physically tiring. In the end, a good teacher always notices when a text has been copied indiscriminately and will sniff out the trick. There again, if it has been copied selectively, the student deserves full credit.
But I think there’s one effective way of exploiting the defects of the Internet for educational purposes. For a class exercise, homework, or university essay, give the following subject: “Find a series of unreliable arguments available on the Internet, and explain why they are unreliable.” Here is research that demands critical skill and an ability to compare different sources, and that enables students to practice the art of discrimination.
2006