Brad Stone logged on, only to see his work had once again been deleted.It wasn’t good enough for one of Wikipedia’s other editors and was flagged as biased, undoing his modifications to an entry in the online encyclopedia.

Stone, an EMT from Cambridge, Mass., was in an “edit war.”

Such edit wars happen every day on Wikipedia, the online, user-generated encyclopedia Stone helps to edit along with about 100,000 others. The encyclopedia’s first 7.2 million entries were crafted through more than 282 million edits, according to a Hewlett-Packard Labs report.

The online resource has grown to more than 8 million entries in 250 languages since its inception in 2001.

The digital knowledge base would span 666 volumes if it were printed in 10-inch-tall-by-2-inch-thick books, but whether those volumes of information would be considered acceptable for academic research is a debated topic.

Many point to the daily “edit wars” as a safeguard that ensures the site’s information is accurate and up-to-date.

Critics, however, such as the publishers of Encyclopedia Britannica, point to the grassroots editing as a sign of instability and say only experts should contribute to true reference materials.

As a result, the Web site’s usage in academic research has been limited recently by some university faculty across the country. Some have opted to ban the site as a citable source; others don’t even want the tool on the research radar.

The site’s popularity has grown significantly over the years. Once below the 10,000 mark in Internet traffic rankings, Wikipedia is now the eighth most visited site on the World Wide Web, according to Alexa, an Internet traffic ranking service.

Professors React

Mark Bloom, an instructor in the Department of Biology, said students likely gravitate to the site because it’s easy to use.

“It’s becoming this cult thing now, and people are using it like crazy,” Bloom said. “They think everything on the Internet is true, and they don’t go to the (original) source.”

Many professors aren’t as fond, though.

Bloom said the site can provide a quick fix of information but doesn’t always elaborate on the nuance of an issue or can misrepresent a complicated issue.

“You get two paragraphs of something that gives you the nuts and bolts of something so it’s easy to get the big points of something that way,” Bloom said.

Jeff Coffer, chair of the Department of Chemistry, agreed.

“The issues are so complex, it’s easy to get a narrower view or just a snapshot of what’s going on,” Coffer said. “So, I think one has to be careful. I think that’s the downside to the information age.”

That’s why, he said, even if Wikipedia was acceptable as a springboard for student research, it’s definitely unacceptable for higher-level academic research.

“I certainly wouldn’t use it for detailed scholarly activities,” Coffer said.

The online source can be especially problematic in the sciences, said Gary Evans, professor of electrical engineering at Southern Methodist University and president of SMU’s faculty senate.

“I’ve seen textbooks that have major conceptual errors, too, so its not just Wikipedia,” Evans said. “Maybe it’s just the fact that humans are doing it, and there are always errors and biases when humans are involved.”

Ralph Carter, chair of the Department of Political Science, said for some areas of research, bias can creep into an entry. That’s why, he said, he won’t immediately discard research that includes Wikipedia, but said it sends up a red flag to see Wikipedia in a bibliography.

“Any online source is less subjected to the peer review process than any print source,” Carter said. “They shouldn’t fail to use (Internet sources) if they’re an appropriate source, but they need to know what those appropriate sources are.”

Don Coerver, associate dean of the AddRan College of Humanities and Social Sciences, agreed.

“You can put a spin on it, and that’s worse than being wrong,” said Coerver, who teaches history of Latin America and U.S. business. “You can point to most of the facts as being correct but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be better to find another source.”

That’s why peer-reviewed sources, such as academic journals, are superior to Wikipedia, said Richard Enos, a professor in the English Department who used to edit Advances in the History of Rhetoric, a research publication from the American Society for the History of Rhetoric.

“The most important feature of journals that are peer-reviewed is that they really adjudicate the (research) process,” Enos said. “The researcher has to present the research and make a good argument to people who are judges in the field.”

That process, Enos said, is absent from the Wikipedia editing process.

“When you get things that aren’t adjudicated, you don’t get that opposition for evaluation,” Enos said.

He said the discussion that goes on before an article is published in a peer-reviewed environment is essential, even on subjects that may seem more straightforward.

“Even science is a rhetorical activity in that you have to persuade your audience of the saliency of not just your observations, but how you argue them,” Enos said.

Reliability

Some studies, however, have refuted the allegations against the site.

A 2005 study by Nature, a weekly scientific journal, found Wikipedia’s collaborative content to be almost as accurate as that of Encyclopedia Britannica, which is also free online.

For the study, the magazine clipped 42 corresponding entries from each publication and put them up for review by what Nature deemed relevant experts.

The entries cumulatively had eight egregious errors in the texts – four in Wikipedia, four in Britannica.

Britannica has disputed the study, however.

“Almost everything about the journal’s investigation, from the criteria for identifying inaccuracies to the discrepancy between the article text and its headline, was wrong and misleading,” according to a report from Britannica refuting the study.

Wikipedia stands by its ability, however, to aggregate factual information into an encyclopedia-type text.

“Wikipedia articles are living drafts that are continually being updated and improved upon,” according to a statement from the Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia.

And as traditional encyclopedia authors rely on a handful of writers and researchers, Wikipedia continues to open its content for revision – a problem to critics, but the organization’s self-proclaimed strong suit.

A 2007 study by the Information Dynamics Laboratory at Hewlett-Packard Labs found the Wikipedia mentality to be an effective approach, at least in the online realm.

“The high-quality articles are distinguished by a marked increase in number of edits, number of editors and intensity of cooperative behavior, as compared to other articles of similar visibility and age,” according to the lab’s report, Assessing the Value of Cooperation and Quality in Wikipedia.

Still Not Good Enough

Despite Nature’s or the Information Dynamics Laboratory’s findings, even some Wikipedia editors, like Stone, doubt the site’s utility as an academic research tool.

“I think Wikipedia works, and it’s a fantastic idea, and its going to improve our ability to get access to modern, updated information,” Stone said. “But, the problem is because there are so many people editing it, the possibility of running into some small piece of information that’s incorrect embedded in the article is very high.”

Stone said the larger concepts within articles are almost always accurate, as the Britannica study found, because everything on the site must be attributed to credible sources.

While that gets articles to the point of being factually accurate and rounds out the larger points, Stone said, it often could omit nuance or result in bias.

Jeff Bond, a science librarian at the Mary Couts Burnett Library, said that’s why he often uses Wikipedia as a springboard for his research.

“Some of the articles do have a reference list at the end, and those references can be a good spring point toward other research,” Bond said.

He said the site just can’t match other Internet resources, most of which are easily accessible to students, when it comes to undergraduate research.

“At that level of research every source you’d want to use would have to be some type of scholarly peer-reviewed type of material,” Bond said.