W IKIPEDIA : A TOOL FOR CRITICAL THINKING AND INFORMATION FLUENCY Little Elm Summer Learning Summit June 9, 2015

Presenter Introduction Kaeli Vandertulip — Associate Professor of Library Science, Texas Wesleyan University — BS in Biology, MS in Library Science, MS in Health Informatics, MBA in Health Management

Critical Thinking ●Who said it? ●What did they say? ●Where did they say it? ●When did they say it? ●Why did they say it? ●How did they say it?

Evaluating Information ●Who is the author? What else did they write about? What are his/her credentials? ●Verifiability: Is this information accurate? o —Bibliography/Works Cited/References o —Using a reference page to find more resources ●How do I want to use it? o Inspiration, to prove a point, to narrow a topic

Information Resources ●Primary o — Original research o — Direct quotes ●Secondary o — Review articles o — News articles ●Tertiary o — Encyclopedia entries

Introduction to Wikipedia ●Sixth most visited page worldwide o —After Google, Facebook, Youtube, Baidu, and Yahoo o #6 in US, too (Amazon replaces Baidu) 1 ●As of today, there are 4,887,194 content articles in English 2

Who writes Wikipedia? ●Called Editors ●24,457,390 names users 1 ●—All volunteer 1 ●—90% of volunteers are male 2 ●—10,000 editors make more than 100 edits 2 ●—10% of editors make 86% of edits (excluding bot edits) ●.1% make 44% 2

The.1%

Is it Reliable? ●Small scale studies by Nature and Oxford o —Both find similar levels of reliability in articles when compared with standard encyclopedias ●Two notes of caution o —Small samples (42 articles, 22 articles) o —Wikipedia articles are not always comparable to EB articles

What you won’t find in an encyclopedia… But also... wiki/Portrayal_of_women_in_ comicshttp://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Portrayal_of_women_in_ comics

Quick Compare: EB vs Wiki /chess

Accuracy of Health Data ●72% of Internet users searched the web for health questions in the last year 4 ●Wikipedia results are in the top ten results 71-85% of the time 2 ●A 2014 study of physicians found that 70% used Wikipedia to answer health questions 1 ●28,000 articles pertaining to health 1 ●Review of pharmacological information was both relatively accurate (with less than.3% factual errors) and complete 3

Types of Articles ●Editor community evaluates pages o Fitness=Verifiability, ease of understanding, completeness ●Good Article ●Featured Articles ●Protected Articles

Quality Assurance ●Watchlist ●Recent Changes ●Bots—responsible for about 10% of wiki edits ●Page protection—editing by less- established editors or sock puppets not allowed ●Edit filters—limit how much can be edited or removed ●Blocking and banning users

Effectiveness of QA 42% of damaged articles repaired within one viewing (no impact) 11% of damaged articles remain present after 100 viewings

Types of Damaged Articles

What does Wikipedia consider itself? “…the goal of Wikipedia isn't to contain all human knowledge—it's to provide a starting point for readers, to get them interested enough in the topic that they'll consider reading the cited sources as well. They can't go get more information if you don't tell them where they can do so.”

In short...

The Anatomy of a Wiki Page ●Lead Section ●Infobox ●Headings ●Table of Contents ●Links ●Citations ●Category Information ●Talk ●Edit Information à Edit Summary, authors, etc

Critically Reading a Wikipedia Article Let’s look at… Evaluating sources BS checking/Fact checking Point of View (ideally, Neutral POV) Establishing missing information

What kind of reader are you?

Level 1: Consumer

Level 2: Engager

Level 3: Contributor

Level 4: Editor

Writing for Wikipedia ●Neutral Point of View ●Readability ●Style—Grammar, citations important

Why contribute to Wikipedia? Contributed to the accumulated knowledge about a topic, expanding upon what was known with new information ● — Scholarship ● — Peer Review

Skills Learned when Contributing Technical thinking—computer logic and basic coding Writing clearly for a general audience Research Knowing when and why to cite Peer review

A comment about the “Gotcha” assignment