02.08.05
Vandalism!
Today I was browsing Wikipedia, as I am wont to do, and was informed that someone had written me a private message. It read:
Please stop adding nonsense to Wikipedia. It is considered vandalism. If you want to experiment, please use the sandbox. Thank you. andy 22:49, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Now, there are three interesting things about this message. First, I have never added anything to Wikipedia that could reasonably be described as nonsense. I’m a huge admirer of the project, and have nothing but the utmost respect for its content and its maintainers. Second, I haven’t added anything to Wikipedia in at least a year. What I did submit, way back when, amounted to nothing more than a few minor grammatical corrections, if memory serves. And third, I was not logged in when I received this message.
As it turns out, I received this message because someone from my IP had submitted something of dubious value to the site sometime last week. If I had received the message while browsing at home, that would be the end of it; I have a dynamic IP at home, so the submission in question could have come from any Comcast customer in my neighborhood. At work, however, we have a static IP. That means someone where I work vandalized Wikipedia … and that, I’m almost positive, means one of my students is responsible.
I teach computers to fifth through eighth graders—about a hundred of them. Some of them are remarkably technologically adept, but most of those, I think, aren’t the ones I need to worry about. (Besides, it doesn’t take much computer knowledge to figure out how to use a Wiki—that’s kind of the point.) I can imagine what happened: a kid does a Google search for a class research project, finds Wikipedia in the results, and eventually notices those “Edit” links in the text. The temptation and curiosity is understandable at that age. But it brings up an interesting point: during our internet research unit, I avoided mentioning Wikipedia to the kids, partly out of laziness. Telling them about it would have meant telling them why it’s a good thing, but also why it might not be so good for general research purposes. It would have meant explaining the concept of community-edited content and describing some of the experiments that have been done to test Wikipedia’s accuracy. Inevitably, it would have meant answering questions about how they themselves could edit Wikipedia’s content … and why they probably shouldn’t. I only had a few weeks to cover that unit, and quite frankly Google gave me enough headaches. But did I do them a disservice by ignoring it altogether? Wikipedia articles (and mirrors thereof) pop up frequently in searches; I knew that at some point they’d run across it. (I also knew that chances were good they’d get valid information, and that their teachers wouldn’t know anything about Wikipedia and wouldn’t dock them for using it as a primary source.) Would any mention at all have been better than none, or would it have created more problems than it solved?
I don’t know. But I do know that if I find out who vandalized Wikipedia, someone’s getting extra homework real soon.
