Wikipedia Audit

For this class our midterm was to audit a Wikipedia entry and present on our results. This is only the second time that I have dealt with some of the back-end procedures of Wikipedia. (The first time was creating/editing my own Wiki for another class.) Auditting was a truly next-level experience and I could honestly admit that at some points I noticed myself sort of enjoying it. Our topic was Polygamy in North America and as soon as this topic came to light I knew there was going to be some sort of bias involved with its resources. It's almost impossible to have a topic that is closely related to a major/controversial religion and not have bias information. Needlessly to say, we, as a group, were confident that we would dig up something interesting to present.

A little about our process:
We first thought about splitting up the article into sections and tackling the assignment that way with each person focusing on a different section. Someone had the thought that it was possible for other sections to touch on each other and kind of tie the whole article together. For example, if there was something that could be considered 'missing' in one section, it was likely to be addressed in the next since the section titles were only loosely descriptive. This would cause more work than necessary to be done in the long run. Ultimately we decided to independently read the article and contrive our own thoughts about it then meet up and use what we agreed on as the premise for our project. It seemed to work out well because at the meeting we were all ready on track for determining bias and non-credible sources.

What we found:
After examining all of the sources cited in the Wiki article we found a considerable amount of information that was from Mormon websites. These articles and web references were mostly in support of Polygamy as a lifestyle dictated by religious practice. While there was nothing outlandish in most of the article's claims, just the nature of where they came from was suspect. Tom also noticed that there were four citations on one statistic that had little to do with the topic of the articles. We concluded that the Wiki got so diluted by users editing it that whatever statement was originally made got transformed into a small factoid.

Our Topic was Polygamy in NORTH AMERICA and we were surprised with the lack of information regarding Canada and Mexico. After a small amount of google-ing we noticed that there is a TON of information out there about polygamy in Mexico and Canada, but none of it was included in the Wiki. Max, in my opinion, did a great job at pulling out some of the most crucial of this information.


After working on this project I am a little hesitant about using Wikipedia. The information is written with such confidence that its sometimes really tough to figure out what is true and what is not. I feel like from now on I will be more interested in reading the sources from Wikipedia articles rather than just trusting them right off the bat. I think like more people should audit Wikis in order to fully understand the websites purpose.