Even Jimmy Wales will tell you that you shouldn’t use Wikipedia for serious research in a college paper. Far from the “sum of all human knowledge” the Wikimedia Foundation tells its would-be donors that they are providing to humanity, Wales admits to his audience — once they have arranged to pay his six-figure speaking fee — that Wikipedia merely provides “good enough knowledge, depending on what your purpose is”. (Wikipedia Founder Discourages Academic Use of His Creation)

Here at Akahele, we’ll spare you the $100K fee and admit, free of charge, that Wikipedia is indeed a source to be read with care. We’ll even elaborate on that a bit and provide you with a list of simple steps to get the most out of Wikipedia. But we’ll do so without warranty — don’t go blaming us if you follow these tips and still are misled by something you’ve read on Wikipedia.

Tip 1: Know the authors

The top 83 authors of [[Bill Gates]]

Nearly 75% of human edits to Wikipedia are made by a mere 1400 people. (Raw Thought: Who Writes Wikipedia?) So the first step to getting the most out of Wikipedia is to find out who wrote the article you’re reading. Wikipedia doesn’t provide this list directly, but it’s easy to generate from the history data they provide, and many Wikipedians have provided tools which do it for you. For example, if you go to the Wikipedia page history statistics tool, select en.wikipedia, and put “Bill Gates” in the page list, you’ll see a list of the top 1000 contributors to the article on Bill Gates. Once you have that list, it’s just a matter of following the links to the user pages to learn more about the contributors. Again, using the example of Bill Gates and its top contributor, User:Gazpacho, following the link to that user’s user page you can see that this user has been blocked indefinitely for using one or more accounts abusively. Following the link to the block log you can read exactly why this user was asked not to edit Wikipedia any more, and if you click on “confirmed” you can see the list of this person’s other accounts, including his/her IP address.

IP addresses can be a useful source of information when finding out more about the authors of a Wikipedia article. Wikipedians like to call people who edit without logging in “anonymous”, but often an IP address can give more information about an author than a username. Some useful things to do with an IP address include using a geolocation service, looking at the IRC logs at Wikipedia Watch, and running them against WikiScanner. In any case, whether you have an IP address, a username, or both, you can access all that user’s contributions (that haven’t been deleted) by going to their user page and clicking on “User contributions”.

Now you might not want to go through all 1000 of the top contributors, but as long as you do some basic research on say the top 200-300, you should have a pretty good idea of who your authors are.

Tip 2: Read the talk page

[[George W. Bush]] has 62 archive pages. Most articles have fewer.

Often when an article contains controversial information, it will be discussed on the talk page. Talk pages have some advantages over article pages. They are generally less censored, and most comments on them are usually signed by their author. After reading the article, or maybe between reading it a first time and a second time, be sure to read the talk page discussions to see some information which was left out of the article and why. Talk pages have histories, which should be used to find information that has been removed (see below), but many also have archives of page histories. The links to the archives aren’t always in the same place, but a search for the term “archive” might lead you to them.

Read through the talk page and its archives, and do some research on the authors if there are any statements which need more context. It’s better not to skimp on this step — even the longest talk pages can usually be read in a few hours, and the investigation of authors that you perform while reading the talk page will probably mostly overlap with the investigation you do for the article itself.

Tip 3: Follow the references

Over 100,000 Wikipedia articles have no references, making this step especially easy.

A great thing about Wikipedia is that, early on, contributors realized that anonymous information dumps are useless without citations, and guidelines were put in place to encourage, if not mandate, inline citations. Follow them. While having superscript numbers might make a statement look authoritative, keep in mind your authors whom you researched in the first tip. For all you know, that superscript number was added by User:Gazpacho — in other words, the citation may have been spurious or might not even exist. Most citations in Wikipedia are to online sources. While that often means you need to check the citations within those citations, eventually you should find yourself reading a trustworthy source. If not, move on to tip 4.

While following the references, check the publication dates. Hoaxers have admitted to intentionally adding circular references into Wikipedia, and journalists have been caught using Wikipedia as a source or even plagiarizing from it. When checking a reference, make sure the text was added to Wikipedia after the reference was published (see tip 4 below).

Tip 4: Check the page history

WikiBlame is a great time saver when it works.

As I alluded to in my first tip, Wikipedia keeps track of every single edit made to every single article, and except for the parts that are deleted, any reader is free to examine them. Use this to your advantage. After reading an article, go through the history to find out the authors of the parts you haven’t been able to confirm with trustworthy sources. A binary search through the history can usually find this information, and often you can narrow down the range by looking at the talk page. Sometimes the WikiBlame tool even works to find it automatically. While reading through the history, you might even find some good information that was later taken out. Look for edit summaries mentioning “rv”, “revert”, “rm”, or “removed”. Spot check some random historical versions to see what’s there. Run diffs between the current version and the last one by your favorite authors.

Going through every single historical version could take months, so we can’t suggest this. But if you spend maybe 5 or 6 hours checking through selected historical versions you should get most of the information you’d get from a full review of every revision.

Tip 5: Check for deletions

Any admin can delete historical revisions.

The tips above assume the information you’re looking for wasn’t intentionally hidden. The two main ways in which historical information can be removed from Wikipedia is “deletion” and “suppression”. In the case of deletion, you can generally determine what happened by looking at the deletion log. At a minimum it is suggested that you check the deletion log for deleted content in the article, talk, or user pages you look at. If you find deleted material you can then do an on-site search of “articles for deletion”, “requests for arbitration”, “administrator’s noticeboard”, etc. to see if the details of the deletion are discussed (beware that this information may not show up in Google searches — you have to use the on-site search). With  suppressed materials, often there is no obvious record that material has in fact been removed. Following the mailing lists, Wikipedia Review, Wikitruth, IRC, the various blogs, etc., is useful if you want the best chance at finding out about this material.

Tip 6: Check other sources

CC-BY-ND photo courtesy Jeffrey Beall

The first three tips are best for evaluating the accuracy of the information in the article. The last three help catch the important information which has been removed. The most important of these last three is to check other sources. If you have access to a library, use it. This will help with checking references in tip 3, and it’ll also help in finding other sources besides Wikipedia to read about your topic. An encyclopedia is no substitute for doing real research. It’s best if you check your library first, so you can go into your Wikipedia reading with a good overview of what the real world experts think about a topic.

Conclusion

If you follow a few simple tips, you too can get access to “good enough knowledge, depending on what your purpose is”. But mind our disclaimer: even if you follow all of these tips, you still might be misled. Don’t blame us if this happens.