A troubling new study released yesterday revealed that 80 percent of all statistics are made up.
Just kidding.
Forgive us for using an old joke, but new controversies are making us question the growing dependence of paper writers on the Internet.
There's no denying that the site Wikipedia.org, an online, nonprofit encyclopedia, is a useful tool for research. Pages often include a wealth of information, and if a topic is popular enough, there will probably be quite a few links, as well. Plus, discussion pages can yield new points of view on areas of contention.
Unfortunately, the information itself shouldn't be allowed to pass the bar for use in an academic environment. While the information is peer-reviewed, users can still upload false information that could be stated as true for days before it is verified - especially on obscure topics where readers are less likely to browse in and find errors themselves.
That's not to say all information on a Wikipedia page is useless by definition. Conceptual explanations can help confused students begin to get a handle on interpreting information they may have read elsewhere. And, as mentioned by students and professors in today's front-page story, the links can be a great starting point for verifying facts. Still, how trustworthy are the sites that Wikipeida links to?
It turns out that the problem with Wikipedia is one that could be examined as a microcosm for the problem with Internet sources in general.
For example, sites about particularly controversial topics will often have a bias, even if they parade as nonpartisan think tanks. Facts are often left without citation, or are culled from a slanted collection of studies. Other times, studies done by the Web sites themselves are so flawed that anyone who has taken a basic statistical research class can tell you why the study doesn't pass muster.
Take, for example, an often-mentioned Nature article that compared the online encyclopedia to Encyclopedia Brittanica and found the two surprisingly close in terms of accuracy.
What most articles fail to mention is that scientific articles alone were tested. Major complaints against Wikipedia have usually been from individuals who claimed biographical misrepresentations - not scientists who claimed their work was misrepresented.
So who can you trust?
Maybe no one - at least on the Internet. But as long as reference Web sites are viewed with skepticism and used as starting points, that doesn't mean that they can't be just as useful as their printed counterparts.
