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W IKIPEDIA : A TOOL FOR CRITICAL THINKING AND INFORMATION FLUENCY Little Elm Summer Learning Summit June 9, 2015

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Presenter Introduction Kaeli Vandertulip Associate Professor of Library Science, Texas Wesleyan University BS in Biology, MS in Library Science, MS in Health Informatics, MBA in Health Management

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Critical Thinking Who said it? What did they say? Where did they say it? When did they say it? Why did they say it? How did they say it?

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Evaluating Information Who is the author? What else did they write about? What are his/her credentials? Verifiability: Is this information accurate? o Bibliography/Works Cited/References o Using a reference page to find more resources How do I want to use it? o Inspiration, to prove a point, to narrow a topic

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Information Resources Primary o Original research o Direct quotes Secondary o Review articles o News articles Tertiary o Encyclopedia entries

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Introduction to Wikipedia Sixth most visited page worldwide o After Google, Facebook, Youtube, Baidu, and Yahoo o #6 in US, too (Amazon replaces Baidu) 1 As of today, there are 4,887,194 content articles in English 2

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Who writes Wikipedia? Called Editors 24,457,390 names users 1 All volunteer 1 90% of volunteers are male 2 10,000 editors make more than 100 edits 2 10% of editors make 86% of edits (excluding bot edits) .1% make 44% 2

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The.1%

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Is it Reliable? Small scale studies by Nature and Oxford o Both find similar levels of reliability in articles when compared with standard encyclopedias Two notes of caution o Small samples (42 articles, 22 articles) o Wikipedia articles are not always comparable to EB articles

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What you wont find in an encyclopedia But also...http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Portrayal_of_women_in_ comicshttp://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Portrayal_of_women_in_ comics

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Quick Compare: EB vs Wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/109 655/chess

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Accuracy of Health Data 72% of Internet users searched the web for health questions in the last year 4 Wikipedia results are in the top ten results 71-85% of the time 2 A 2014 study of physicians found that 70% used Wikipedia to answer health questions 1 28,000 articles pertaining to health 1 Review of pharmacological information was both relatively accurate (with less than.3% factual errors) and complete 3

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Types of Articles Editor community evaluates pages o Fitness=Verifiability, ease of understanding, completeness Good Article Featured Articles Protected Articles

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Quality Assurance Watchlist Recent Changes Botsresponsible for about 10% of wiki edits Page protectionediting by less- established editors or sock puppets not allowed Edit filterslimit how much can be edited or removed Blocking and banning users

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Effectiveness of QA 42% of damaged articles repaired within one viewing (no impact) 11% of damaged articles remain present after 100 viewings

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Types of Damaged Articles

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What does Wikipedia consider itself? the goal of Wikipedia isn't to contain all human knowledgeit's to provide a starting point for readers, to get them interested enough in the topic that they'll consider reading the cited sources as well. They can't go get more information if you don't tell them where they can do so.

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In short...

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The Anatomy of a Wiki Page Lead Section Infobox Headings Table of Contents Links Citations Category Information Talk Edit Information Edit Summary, authors, etc

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Critically Reading a Wikipedia Article Lets look at Evaluating sources BS checking/Fact checking Point of View (ideally, Neutral POV) Establishing missing information

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What kind of reader are you?

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Level 1: Consumer

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Level 2: Engager

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Level 3: Contributor

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Level 4: Editor

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Writing for Wikipedia Neutral Point of View Readability StyleGrammar, citations important

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Why contribute to Wikipedia? Contributed to the accumulated knowledge about a topic, expanding upon what was known with new information Scholarship Peer Review

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Skills Learned when Contributing Technical thinkingcomputer logic and basic coding Writing clearly for a general audience Research Knowing when and why to cite Peer review

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A comment about the Gotcha assignment