Wikipedia and the Quest for a Universal Encyclopedia

Aug 31, 2023

42:31

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Education Headline Roundup

It’s been a busy week in education news as students and educators in the U.S. head back to school following summer break. Here are the headlines in this week’s edu news roundup:

The Biden administration is once again attempting to follow through on campaign promises to alleviate student debt. Details of the SAVE program are discussed.
The Boys & Girls Club of America has released a new study revealing troubling trends in levels of bullying and cyberbulling in American schools.
The College Board is in hot water over revelations that it sends student SAT scores and GPAs to Facebook and TikTok through tracking pixels (advertising technology).
The Columbia County Library in Dayton, Washington, is facing a possible dissolution vote on November 7th after a series of book challenges.
Governor Maura Healey of Massachusetts announced a new program that would make community college tuition-free for residents without a prior post-secondary degree.

Wikipedia and the Quest for a Universal Encyclopedia

Wikipedia is the largest and most-read reference work in history. Maintained by a large cohort of volunteer editors, the free, online encyclopedia aims to make “the sum of all human knowledge” available to the world. The project of Wikipedia sparks a number of questions of interest to the modern educator, such as: What is expertise? What events, locations, objects, people, artworks, and inventions etc. are noteworthy? What exactly is a neutral point of view? How does living contemporaneously to events of historical significance impact our ability to evaluate them accurately?

Is Wikipedia Trustworthy?

Wikipedia is a living document, an undulating sea of interconnected articles, references, policies, and end users. Though neutrality is a guiding Wikipedian philosophy, vandalism does sometimes occur, and mistakes are sometimes made. (Studies have shown, however, that Wikipedia is nearly as accurate as traditional print reference resources, such as Encyclopedia Britannica.) We’ll investigate the epistemological challenges inherent to a collaborative and ever-evolving repository of knowledge. We’ll also uncover some startling demographic statistics about Wikipedia’s editors, who aren’t as representative of the average world citizen as you might think.

The Impact of AI and Other Modern Internet Forces on Wikipedia

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) is having a major impact on Wikipedia. AI can be used to generate content, summarize articles, and identify vandalism. However, AI also poses a threat to the integrity of the content of Wikipedia, as it often introduces inaccuracies, fabrications, and “hallucinations,” some of which can be extremely difficult to detect. Other modern Internet forces, such as deepfakes and misinformation, are also disrupting Wikipedia’s vast knowledge experiment.

Join us as we investigate the history and impact of one of the world’s top 10 websites.