User:Mike Christie/The citation habit

Wikipedia has changed me. I used to pick up popularizations of science, history, and philosophy, and read them happily. Now I glance at my copy of Alison Weir's The Princes in the Tower, and I mutter "Not a reliable source" under my breath, and ignore it. I may have to take it to the second-hand bookstore to get it out of my sight. Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe—one of the finest popular books on physics ever written, and certainly the best on string theory—is still on my shelf, but will I ever refer to it again?

I suspect I will recover from this citationitis eventually, but in the meantime I find it has permeated my critical thinking. When I read an article in the NYT, I automatically wonder where they got their information from. I look at an opinion piece by an economist on the Troubled Assets Relief Program and wonder what his sources are, and whether they would hold up to scrutiny. I'm still interested in the opinion of experts, but I want to know the basis for their opinions; I'm still interested in their credentials, but I also want to know their sources.

One of the best content editors on Wikipedia, qp10qp, has said somewhere that their first few weeks or months on Wikipedia were essentially wasted, because they added accurate and carefully sourced material to a great many articles, but neglected to cite their sources. When I read that a light clicked on in my head; or perhaps I should say I opened my eyes and realized I was already in the same place qp10qp had reached. I find it extremely difficult now to make a content edit that doesn't cite a reliable source. It feels like such a waste of time without a <ref> tag at the end of the paragraph.

And recently I've come to wonder whether this might be a good disease to have; more specifically, if this is a disease that would be beneficial to spread. There have been plenty of debates about the possible role of editing Wikipedia as part of a curriculum. Students who learn Wikipedia's policies and become good content editors have certainly learned a great deal more than just the content of the article. Is it possible that editing Wikipedia can supply an editor with a critical habit of mind?

I would like to think so. There's a wonderful web comic that sums up this idea very neatly; I am that Wikipedian protester, and I claim that spreading that attitude among those interested enough in information to think critically about it is a step towards a more educated population—more capable of making sensible voting decisions; more capable of filtering garbage from the media channels and identifying quality information, and more capable of finding out answers for themselves.

I've tried to contribute a lot to Wikipedia over the last three years, but I think Wikipedia has done more for me than I've done for it.