March 16, 2007
Circlesourcing at Wikipedia
Tim Melly makes an interesting point about Wikipedia. Since he was fairly meandering about it, I’ll recap it here in telegraphic form:
- Wikipedia is full of claims that are sourceable in principle, but aren’t actually sourced.
- Mainstream journalists use information from Wikipedia, even if it is not further sourced. (He has an anecdote to illustrate the point.)
- Those very articles can be viewed as authoritative for Wikipedia’s own sourcing purposes.
- Thus, unsourced information could, by virtue of having been placed in Wikipedia, grow to be regarded as authoritative by Wikipedia itself.
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2 Responses to “Circlesourcing at Wikipedia”
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It helps if the mainstream journalists fail to cite Wikipedia as their source – for if they do, the back reference would hopefully be called out by editors.
But that’s not the usual practice with reference works. If you trust the reference work, and you’re not copying at length, you just assume its “facts” are correct.
The problem is that journalists aren’t always careful about going to unimpeachable sources, and this is compounded by the fact that they themselves may be viewed as authoritative despite their lack of — or lack of time for — due diligence.