Users should take extra care when exploring Wikipedia’s science topics, because many articles on controversial issues such as global warming and acid rain have been targeted for editing by revisionists who reject scientific findings, new research has found.
In a nutshell, Wikipedia users should be mindful that the site is “vulnerable to vandalism and other shenanigans,” the researchers warned.
Wilson and Likens, who also are affiliated with the University of Connecticut’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, analyzed seven Wikipedia articles. They set out to prove that articles on topics that have achieved a scientific consensus, yet are politically controversial, are significantly more subject to revision than articles on other topics.
They chose three politically controversial topics — evolution, global warming and acid rain. They selected four uncontroversial topics as well — the standard model of physics, the theory of general relativity, continental drift, and heliocentricism, which is the astronomical model that places the sun rather than the Earth at the center of the solar system.