Wikipedia and the Quest for a Universal ...

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.

Sources & Resources:

TED Talk - The Birth of Wikipedia

The Independent - Nobody should trust Wikipedia, says man who invented Wikipedia by Mayank Aggarwal

YouTube - The White House: President Biden Announces the SAVE Plan for Student Loan Borrowers

NPR - Borrowers can now apply for new, income-based student loan repayment by Sequoia Carrillo and Cory Turner

Boys & Girls Clubs of America - Youth Right Now

Axios - Students face new school year with jump in bullying by April Rubin

Gizmodo - The College Board Tells TikTok and Facebook GPAs and Details About SAT Scores by Thomas Germain

WBUR - Community college is now free for Mass. residents 25 and older. Millions qualify by Max Larkin

KNKX NPR - Rural Washington library could be nation’s first to dissolve after book challenges by Courtney Flatt

The Book Loft - The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick

Wikipedia - Wikipedia

Wikipedia - Help: Introduction to Policies and Guidelines

Wikipedia - What Wikipedia is Not

Technology Review - The Decline of Wikipedia by Tom Simonite

Duke University Press - Wikipedia's Race and Ethnicity Gap and the Unverifiability of Whiteness by Michael Mandiberg

Aljazeera - How are Wikipedians fighting gender bias online? 

HBR - Why Do So Few Women Edit Wikipedia? by Nicole Torres

Vice - AI Is Tearing Wikipedia Apart by Claire Woodcock

The Next Web - UK plan to police internet may be unlawful, force Wikipedia shutdown by Thomas Macaulay

UK Parliament - Online Safety Bill

The Economic Times - How accurate is Wikipedia's content? 

Governance, Organization, and Democracy on the Internet: The Iron Law and the Evolution of Wikipedia by Piotr Konieczny