Lakes and rivers of information

A reporter interviews me on wikipedia and my brain turned to metaphors. Here's my latest for wikipedia... lakes and rivers, stocks and flows. And hence different skills required and different strengths built up.

Wikipedia

I have written about this before (here) but a recent phone call brought the issue to a head for me again. The question is, will people continue to rely on wikipedia and won't they be discouraged by the vandals? And, from the academic perspective, how can we countenance students' use of such a technology?

The answer to both of these questions lies in the difference between wikipedia and a regular encyclopedia. Despite the name, wikipedia is nothing like a regular encyclopedia. You can think of it as the difference between a stock and a flow of information. A book or other material information product is static. It has an existence that is fixed in time.

Wikipedia is, on the other hand, a flow of information that humans can turn into knowledge through their use of the flow. It is in this use - and training how to use it - that the potential exists to turn the flow into useful knowledge. You need to know how to read wikipedia, including paying attention to the discussion, the revisions on the page history, and with attention to the sources, and THEN you can make use of it.

It could be argued that a book is similar in that you should know something about the publisher and perhaps the book series, the editor, the author, and the citations that the author uses. You might even have an idea of the "conversation" that a book is part of, by reading prior and subsequent books on the topic. But we have internalized (and in many cases neglected) that process and nowadays often think of books as static things that represent a fixed knowledge object. Certainly professors who bias their students against wikipedia are implicitly favouring the stock versus the flow.

Coping with a stock is usually easier than a flow. If you use the water analogy, swimming in a lake is less challenging than swimming in a river. Particularly a fast-moving "river" of information like wikipedia. But the rewards are great. At the university level I think the greatest reward is not so much the object itself - the information you encounter - but the skills you gain while using such a challenging resource. Just as swimming upstream can make you stronger, or coping with currents can make you more skillful, using wikipedia requires that the user become engaged. They have to know about, and visit, and comprehend the discussion page. They have to look at the revisions and make some judgment about the volatility of the information on the main page from what they see in the number and character of the changes. You also have the opportunity to participate, which is the real marvel of wikipedia.

We might think of this form of knowledge as having first, second, and third order impacts. Just as cars let people move more quickly but soon led to roads and then shopping malls, wikipedia and similar channels of information contain implications beyond the first blush.

• The student who encounters wikipedia for the first time has the opportunity to find up-to-date information on a range of topics that a normal encyclopedia (or library, for that matter) couldn't possibly cope with. This is the first order impact.
• The student who engages with wikipedia by reading the revision history, by reviewing the discussion for the page, by comparing the sources and perhaps some of the cross links, exercises their intellectual muscle and (potentially) becomes a better scholar - provided they have some training along the way and aren't swept onto the rocks. This is the second order impact, not just more information but people better at the process of turning information into knowledge.
• The student who is familiar with wikipedia, has facility with not just searching but absorbing and critiquing information and is sufficiently engaged with the process that they feel motivated to contribute now has the opportunity to participate by creating a page or adding to and refining existing pages. In other words, they are a participant and not a consumer of the world of knowledge. This is the third order impact.

Books, of course, provide information but they do not, in and of themselves facilitate the transformation of readers into writers. I don't want to suggest that wikipedia can do this on its own. In fact, just as teaching people to swim in a river is a grave responsibility, so is encouraging students to use wikipedia. They have to be guided to the resources and warned of the dangers. But the payoff is considerable and shouldn't be ignored.

I hope to return to this topic again, but I welcome your feedback (smith@sfu.ca).