wiki mo mukha mo

Some blogs of college students I've been to bemoan this problem: their professors have excluded Wikipedia as a source to be used in their term papers. One student went as far as to say that it's not fair to exclude encyclopedia x from sources to be used just because it is community-maintained. "What a hassle!" that student wrote. What a hassle indeed. Imagine, you go online in an Internet cafe or at home. Your instant messenger is on, your various accounts on Friendster-like sites need to be updated, your blog beckons, that anime series you've been following closely is now up on Youtube, you have emails to read and reply to, you have new photos upload to Flickr. So many high priority items, so little time.

Oops, you have a term paper. (Dammit, what a hassle! We have to carefully word our chosen problems, go through previously done studies on it, sort out relevant from pointless data, evaluate the merits of contending positions, critique how the problem was handled, side or not side with an established position, and offer in the end our own position with carefully documented verifiable authoritative sources. I have a life! Hello! Who in his right mind invented the University anyway?)

So. You're online. No need to go through the isles of books in that dusty geek-infested library. You just need to stuff enough paragraphs into those portions called by many names, usually, "introduction/ background of the study," and "review of related literature." Google to the rescue. Wait. Can that thought. Wikipedia it should be. That professor, he doesn't know how much he intrudes into the personal lives of his students. "I'll show him," you mumble with pride, "he'll never know I've paraphrased my paragraphs from Internet sources."

Ok. We get it. We get it. A true and deep-down hassle it is. Pipe down.

Let's jump over into an ideal world for a moment--one far, far away from this one, where miraculously, people can make time to research and separate their thoughts from those of their sources. In that world, maybe those professors are right. Maybe.

When those academics say that Wikipedia cannot be used as an authoritative source of scholarly claims, they actually think (and they are probably insane, you might say) that you actually want to jack up the credibility of your arguments in your term paper. You do this jacking up, of increasing the persuasiveness of your paper, in part, by citing documents written by credentialed scholars who actually took risks by leaving their names on those documents. That means those people are responsible for what they wrote. Silly isn't it? Your professors actually want you to assert in writing that your points are supported by people who stood by what they thought. They are no fun, those professors, even in this ideal world. The Internet, they think is entertainment, entertainment and hearsay, especially collaborative hearsay where hearsay authors are all the more anonymous.

Sources on the Internet per se are not all discredited, the professors add, as there are refereed journals and PDF of books and websites with sensible content. But still, they see collaborative projects like Wikipedia as akin to a public bulletin board where anyone can post anything. Suppose one needs accurate information about sexually transmitted diseases, do we consult a public bulletin board where nonmedical people can post their opinions which may mislead the public? Further, the possible untraceability of authors allowed by such an online collaborative library can dishearten a serious academic who may happen to be your professor. Naturally, for the wide-eyed curious passer by, Wiki is fine. This brings us again to how silly those academics are: they think you are not just a wide-eyed passer by, that you are a serious student. (Hello!)

The classic example of sources acceptable to academics are the entries in the Encyclopedia Britannica, which are authored by credentialed and respected scholars in their respective fields. The thing is, academics expect this to be the yardstick. They impose this expectation, reasonably, to sources, and dismiss those that fail this criterion. A collaborative bulletin board like Wiki the professors see as having content that is amorphous, or editable ad infinitum, and authored by the anonymous public. Had every entry in Wiki been restricted for editing by only a handful of credential-checked individuals, that might change the attitude professors have towards Wiki. Think medical journals online, or the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Academic elitism is not compatible with Wiki's democratic leeway for public input, maybe we should remember that.

If one were testing in class how fast one can highlight and copy-paste Googled up entries, then Wikipedia wins, hands down, as the source of something written about mostly everything. But those skills, fine examples they are of hand-eye coordination, are not what are tested in writing a term paper.

But we all know the bottomline: you don't want to write that term paper, neither here nor in that ideal world. All that cognitive effort is such a hassle. It is easier and more convenient and more sincere to whine. So whine. But in whining, you don't even want to stand out. Standing out with your specific witty and memorable whine takes some research and some thought.

And the effort to be original is such a hassle.