I don’t want to get too much into the pros and cons of Wikipedia since that is always being debated elsewhere. I use Wikipedia quite often. Sometimes I like it and sometimes I don’t. I’m educated enough to know when an entry in Wikipedia is misleading me. However, that’s also is the particular problem with Wikipedia.
A lot of its users, perhaps the majority if one takes the cynical perspective, are not thoroughly grounded in critical and analytical thinking skills. The purpose of a college education should be to develop critical and analytical thinking skills. (Ok, a lot of colleges certainly don’t do that, but that’s another topic). So, a lot of Wikipedia users will be reading it and not know how to think through an entry to determine its validity. They will simply take it as truth. That’s the same problem with a lot of the Web, news media, and even traditional print resources, too. Yet, the Wikipedia brand will give a lot of people confidence in its entries.
The main area of concern should be for young readers. As a typical nerd, the encyclopedia was my favorite book in the house. As a child, even in elementary school, I would literally read the encyclopedia page-by-page and enjoyed it very much. (Yeah, I had an exciting childhood). But at that time, I wasn’t intellectually developed to the point that I could analyze the entries in the encyclopedia. I just took what was in the encyclopedia as the truth.
I do believe that educated people need to embrace Wikipedia and contribute to its editing in order to make it a better resource. Personally, I don’t want to spend my time doing that but hope that some others will do so. I already have enough writing projects to keep me busy.
Wikipedia, like Google, is here to stay and we better get used to it. In fact, Wikipedia offers good opportunities to develop analytical and critical thinking skills. So, as I stumble across things that are questionable, I’m going to highlight those entries here as critical thinking exercises.
The first Wikipedia Critical Thinking Exercise is the entry for Arthur Golden, writer of the novel Memoirs of a Geisha. The entry, as of Nov 1, 2005 is rather short so I’m going to copy it here in its entirety:
Arthur Golden is the writer of the famous novel Memoirs of a Geisha. He was born in 1956 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, a member of the Sulzberger family, owners of the New York Times. He was educated at Harvard College and received a degree in art history, specializing in Japanese art. In 1980, he earned a M.A. in Japanese history at Columbia University, and also learned Mandarin Chinese. After a summer at Beijing University, he worked in Tokyo. When he returned to the United States, he earned an M.A. in English at Boston University. He currently lives in Brookline, Massachusetts with his wife Trudy Legee, whom he married in 1982, and his two children. He is adored in the New England writing community. Memoirs of a Geisha is being made into a feature film starring Zhang Ziyi and Ken Watanabe, and directed by Rob Marshall.
Ok, not much seems wrong with that. It’s mostly a listing of facts. But there’s one sentence that should jump out. Hmmm, I should send this exercise to my young nieces and see if they can spot the problem.
Here’s the problem sentence: He is adored in the New England writing community.
What the heck does that mean? What is the “New England writing community”. Is Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne sitting up in their graves reading Memoirs of a Geisha? Maybe it refers to some good reviews from Updike and John Irving? Hey, they live in New England, no? Maybe it just means that some people from New England gave it good reviews on Amazon. Who knows?
Now, I could go onto Wikipedia myself and edit that entry. But I’m not going to do that because I selfishly don’t want to get sucked into yet another way of spending my time on the net. Actually, editing it would have been quicker than writing this post. And this is not a knock against Wikipedia. And before any Geisha fans attack me, it’s not a knock against the novel or its author either. If anything, it’s a knock against the lack of critical and analytical thinking in America.
Of course, I don’t always think so analytically myself. It’s easier to criticize and edit than it is to create. And the net, especially blogs, easily exposes our lapses in critical thought. But, an encyclopedia is not the place to let sloppy thinking seep in. Perhaps such lapses also exist in Encylopedia Britannica or even World Book. I don’t know, though I suspect that their level of professional editing prevented those mistakes. If anyone has similar examples from print encyclopedias then that would be useful to know.
So, I commend anyone who does spend their time contributing to Wikipedia but Wikipedia is also another good way of reminding us about the importance of educating people in critical thinking skills.
