The value of Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia that has become an Internet phenomenon, generates mixed reactions among academics in Taiwan.
Jessica Cheng (鄭其嘉), an assistant professor at the Catholic Fu Jen University, said that while Wikipedia covers a wide range of material and appears to be a good starting point to look for information, editing privileges are open to anyone and much of the information is composed by non-professionals so the accuracy of the information on Wikipedia is questionable.
"I recommend my students use it as a database where they get a general idea about a certain subject," she said. "But they cannot list it as reference in their [academic] papers."
Cheng was also concerned about the way her students might handle the information taken from Wikipedia. She said that most of them do not usually scrutinize the information they get online. And during her first year as a college professor, she had already caught students who had cut and pasted materials from Web logs without properly citing sources. She found out by simply typing one or two professional-sounding sentences in the papers into Google , she said.
Others, however, defended the utility and its credibility.
"Professors need to remember that students are quite capable of judging the quality of the information they access and use, and can discriminate between trustworthy and untrustworthy, true and false," said David Pendery, an English teacher and a doctoral student at National Chengchi University.
Pendery recognized that there will always be students who simply copy information, but he said that does not mean students should be banned from using a good encyclopedia.
"Good students know to responsibly compare and contrast various sources of information for their assignments," he said. "Wikipedia is simply one source of information among others, and can be legitimately used in this way."
Pendery made a presentation at this year's Wikimania 2007 Conference, where he and four Taiwanese students discussed their experiences using Wikipedia and exchanged ideas about its value. He said that the students compared the contents in Chinese and English Wikipedias and found that the English version is "much more complete," and "less likely to be biased or politicized."
They use and learn from Wikipedia in creative and academic ways, and tend to not harshly criticize its potential pitfalls.
For S.T. Huang (黃申在), associate professor of the National Pingtung University of Science and Technology, the online encyclopedia, with its use of the open-source software "Wiki," can be used to preserve "disappearing local knowledge."
Huang and some local activists in southern Taiwan have been dedicated to the task of accumulating local knowledge for more than 10 years. He said that Wikipedia will help the team establish a local knowledge database for Taiwan that can be accessed by people all over the world.
"Most importantly, it [the database] will become a platform to integrate information of all forms from community residents as well as from professionals, be it photos, films, or those created by the use of GIS (geographical information system) software," he said.
The way knowledge is presented and distributed through Wikipedia has also inspired some researchers at Academic Sinica, who are in the process of compiling the Taiwanese edition of the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL, 生命大百科) Lai Kun-chi (賴昆祺), a researcher with the Academic Sinica's Research Center for Biodiversity, said Wikipedia has set a model of success in constructing a knowledge database using open-source software.
"We aim, in the next five to 10 years, to include information on at least 80 percent of species that can only be found in Taiwan," he said, adding that some of the information has been previously collected through the National Digital Archive Program of the National Science Council.
Like Huang, Lai said that creating a platform similar to Wikipedia has the potential to draw a broad range of contributors and generate more page views. The large number of "wikipedians" who have been active in regulating the quality of new entries also assures Lai that Taiwan's biodiversity will be accurately presented in cyberspace.
Founded in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, Wikipedia has been welcomed by some techno-savvy people as well as criticized by others. It claimed in its own introduction that as of last Wednesday, it has about 7.9 million articles in 253 languages. Approximately 1.9 million articles are composed in English.
John Seigenthaler, administrative assistant to late attorney general Robert Kennedy, has demanded in his editorial published in the Nov. 29, 2005, edition of USA Today that Wikipedia remove the "false content" about him, as he found an online entry saying that "for a brief time, he [Seigenthaler] was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby."
And while Wikipedia staff immediately changed the content upon Seigenthaler's request, they also found that the person who wrote this entry is simply a guy who "works in the office, just goofing around on the Internet."
Comedian Stephen Colbert has also ridiculed Wikipedia a few times on his show The Colbert Report. He once said that he has helped triple the population of elephants in the past 10 years by going to Wikipedia and simply changing the entry for elephants.
"Lord proves what happens when you bring democracy to information," he once said in his show.
The New Yorker ran an article in July last year saying that members of Congress were caught tampering with their own introductions on Wikipedia, such as deleting an entry about a broken campaign promise.
Another most recent example was the death of the Anna Nicole Smith in February. While other wire stories merely reported on Feb. 8 that the model collapsed in a Florida hotel room, Wikipedia had already listed Feb. 8 as the day of her death. The entry merely cited a broadcast from the CBS Evening News as a source.
In response to these anomalies, Wales said in an interview with National Public Radio in April that Wikipedia has beefed up its quality-control mechanism and set guidelines for biographical entries, but he added that the job of fact-checking and editing are really in the hands of online community members.
"Anyone can participate in the editing process of a new entry as well as an old entry; they will then debate, discuss and decide which one is the good source, it's a vibrant community process," he said.
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