On October 26, New York Times reporter (and frequent cheerleader for Wikipedia) Noam Cohen published a story about how Wikipedia's article about the Ebola virus disease is now a credible source, and that its "requirement for sourcing is much more rigorous than for other Wikipedia entries. Newspaper articles, for example, do not cut it." Perhaps Cohen's standards for factual reporting are in the same category as the often laughable reliability of Wikipedia, because as of this moment today (Oct. 28), the New York Times itself is utilized as a source for the Wikipedia article about Ebola , a whopping 14 times.
Wikipedia's own guideline about providing sources for medical topics clearly states:
The popular press is generally not a reliable source for scientific and medical information in articles. Most medical news articles fail to discuss important issues such as evidence quality, costs, and risks versus benefits, and news articles too often convey wrong or misleading information about health care. Articles in newspapers and popular magazines generally lack the context to judge experimental results.
...A news article should therefore not be used as a sole source for a medical fact or figure.
However, looking carefully at the Ebola article on Wikipedia, we can see the New York Times being used as the sole source for medical facts, rather than peer-reviewed medical journals, as the guideline implores. Some examples of Wikipedia's Ebola facts sourced only to the newspaper: "Most people spread the virus through blood, feces and vomit", "It is recommended that the bodies of people who have died from Ebola be buried or cremated only with proper care", and "...Reston ebolavirus... had infected pigs". Thus, even while Cohen may praise the generally better-than-average quality of Wikipedia's article about Ebola, the article repeatedly violates Wikipedia's own guidelines on proper sources, because it references a newspaper for medical facts.
Frankly, it seems that both journalists and media consumers are frequently confused about Wikipedia's reliability. A recent study of British people concluded that more trust is placed in Wikipedia's usually pseudonymous authors than in named journalists working for "upmarket" newspapers like the Telegraph or the Guardian. Wikipedia's content is even trusted more than BBC News journalists. But, do these survey takers not even realize that typically what are being used as "reliable sources" to corroborate Wikipedia content are these very same newspapers that they don't seem to trust? It's like saying you assign more of your trust to a chewed up glob of steak and potatoes and saliva, masticated by some unknown stranger off the street, than to a tastefully-presented steak and potato dinner offered to you piping hot by a well-known chef. At least the study also concluded that five times more Britons place "a great deal" of trust in Encyclopedia Britannica than in Wikipedia.
Is journalist Cohen impartial enough to cover Wikipedia objectively about such an important topic as its coverage of Ebola? He has published numerous New York Times stories about the open encyclopedia project since 2009, when he was invited to speak at the Wikimania international conference in Buenos Aires. (He was not compensated in any way for his talk at Wikimania.) A request to Cohen to clarify his description of the "much more rigorous" standards of Wikipedia's Ebola article was fielded by his editor, who replied "he and The Times stand by his story".
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