Wikipedia Midterm Process Review

These past couple of weeks, I have been acting as a pseudo-auditor for my midterm Wikipedia project. My group and I were in charge of auditing the Wikipedia article “Polygamy in North America.” Overall, I have found the process to be quite interesting. The individual process of combing through the article and disputing all of the facts was honestly a bit dull, but I found the group effort to be very informative. In my group, the process was basically that each of us would read the article, look at the sources, and then meet and exchange our observations. After discussing our findings and coming up with the information we decided to present, we created the power point presentation. What I found most interesting about this auditing process was the different discrepancies that each person found in the article. When I met my group my members I figured that we would have mostly similar results, but I was surprised to find that we all found different problems with the article. It was really interesting to see how each member, and people in general, subconsciously are going to be looking for different things and therefore are prone to noticing certain details more than others when it comes to something like auditing an article. Because of this, each of us found, and missed different problems with the article. Coming together as a group and discussing and pooling our results was really what led to a comprehensive presentation. The whole psychology of this auditing process was really what intrigued me the most and after this midterm I really think that having a team of people audit something is really the best way to have a objective final result.

Furthermore, this midterm has also given me much insight into the true nature of a community powered tool like Wikipedia. Before auditing this article, I may have been somewhat suspicious of certain Wikipedia articles, but usually they would only be articles that were very recently created or about famous people. Before I began auditing “Polygamy in North America”, I really did not think I would find many problems with it since an article about this history and current state of polygamy really shouldn’t merit much subjectivity. I was definitely wrong though, and there were numerous problems found with the article due to both bias as well as negligence. Auditing this article has really made me realize that since Wikipedia articles are created and checked by regular people with unknown skills, every single article on Wikipedia could be subject to the same types of mistakes. I always figured that at least scientific articles would usually be pretty reliable, but now I think that every article on Wikipedia should be suspected to have mistakes until known otherwise. Now granted, I still feel that scientific articles on Wikipedia are fairly reliable and more reliable than any other type of article, but when I read them now I am definitely going to look for oddities more closely than before.