Wikipedia stirs national debate

(U-WIRE) MUNCIE, Ind.-Ball State University junior Paul Grant found something amiss last summer when he accessed Wikipedia.

"Somebody had erased everything under 'China' and put 'A bunch of chinks live there,'" he said.

That didn't deter him from using the popular online encyclopedia, however, and he still uses it two or three times a week, he said.

On March 18, a Wikipedia user replaced the contents in the entry on uranium with "Winthrop won WOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!(3-18-07)," but the change was fixed within minutes.

Last week, another vandal edited the article about comedian Sinbad to say that he had died of a heart attack, when he hadn't, according to the Associated Press.

Wikipedia, founded by Jimmy Wales and run by the Wikimedia Foundation, has taken criticism lately for a variety of topics, including articles with inaccurate information and contributors' misrepresenting themselves.

In July 2006, The New Yorker published a profile of the site, interviewing a contributor calling himself "Essjay."

Essjay, according to the article, was "a tenured professor of religion at a private university" with a doctorate in theology and degree in canon law.

In late February, Essjay turned out to be a 24-year-old college dropout in Louisville, Ky., named Ryan Jordan, according to a correction The New Yorker published.

The uproar led Wales to announce that from then on, Wikipedia would only allow users to claim expert credentials if they could substantiate them.

With more than one million articles, Wikipedia has become so popular that some Ball State students take it for granted.

Senior Beth Nicholson said she assumed Wikipedia was reliable and trusted it overall during her time at Ball State. She had also cited it as a source for research papers.

Still, she relied on scholarly journals more often and said she's been having second thoughts about Wikipedia's accuracy.

"It's helpful sometimes when you're looking for just basic information," she said.

Freshman Mary Davenport said she used Wikipedia when friends mentioned something she hadn't known before, saying that she considered it somewhat reliable.

"I think it's a good starting reference," she said. "But I don't think it should be used as your only one."

In a 2005 interview with BusinessWeek, Wales said he didn't think people should cite any encyclopedia, including Encyclopedia Britannica, and referred to Wikipedia as a work in progress.

Some members of academia have already begun to crack down on students' use of Wikipedia. According to The New York Times, the history department at Middlebury College in Vermont banned citing it entirely.

Meanwhile, at the Ball State Daily News newsroom, a poster hangs from the wall, telling reporters that "Wiki-anything does not count as a source!"

Ball State history professor Anthony Edmonds takes a more moderate approach to the online database.

Edmonds, who said he used Wikipedia for background knowledge and didn't have a formal policy regarding its use by students, said he encouraged students to check information gathered from Wikipedia against other sources.

He said students in his correspondence lessons had cited Wikipedia, though students in his classes on campus hadn't, and that he required them to use JSTOR, an online scholarly journal archive. n