Lockett’s first law of internet-based research

My tendency for the last few years has been to take a hard line on students doing research for their papers on the internet. In fact, for first- and second-year courses, the rule very simply is: DON'T. If in your works cited I see a web address, the paper will receive an automatic fail.

Obviously I will make exceptions in certain classes, and I relax this rule entirely for fourth-year seminars and graduate courses, but for the most part I have become a tyrant about this sort of thing. I have a number of reasons for this.

1. I belong to that endearingly obsolete group of people who believe that going into the actual library is an invaluable learning experience, and that doing research from books fires important parts of the brain that otherwise atrophy when a simple word search finds students the convenient line or phrase they can quote. Call it a character-building exercise if you like, but knowledge is contextual, and working through the stuff that surrounds the conveniently quotable line or phrase—even if you're just skimming—expands your understanding of the subject. More often than not, it also leads to the discovery of material even more relevant or valuable than what you'd been specifically searching for.
   
2. Many students will grasp what qualifies as an authoritative source; many will not. As a case in point: the very first time I TA'd a course, on the very first essay, a student cited two online essays he had found. Now, the student in question wrote a solid paper, a B that with a few tweaks could have been a B+ or even an A. The essays he cited were also first-year English compositions (posted to the web by their professor for reasons passing understanding), neither of which I would have given a grade above a C. So in this instance I had a student quoting as authorities essays by students dumber than him.
   
3. The likelihood of students citing poor sources increases in direct proportion to their haste and/or laziness. As a case in point: a friend of mine, when teaching a course on Holocaust literature, received a final essay that quoted from Stormfront.org and HammerOfThor.net—white supremacist websites with pages dedicated to Holocaust denial. My friend said that it was obvious from the way the student quoted these sites, he was not himself a Neo-Nazi—he just didn't actually bother to read what he was quoting, or really to pay attention to the proudly displayed images of fascist symbology. The entire paper read, my friend continued, as a totally night-before rush job.
   
4. The most commonly-used web resource—Wikipedia—is the antithesis of scholarly authority. One day if I find myself teaching a basic composition course, I will give my students an object lesson in why this is the case. I will assign a crash assignment, to be completed and submitted within forty-eight hours. I will make up a bogus topic—say, the Albanian Wheat Riots of 1875—and instruct them that I want five hundred words detailing the key issues involved. I will then walk from class to my office and write a lengthy and detailed entry on Wikipedia about the Albanian Wheat Riots of 1875, and see just how many of my students quote my fictional history back to me.
   

All that being said, it's really reason #1 that most drives this Luddite impulse—I do firmly believe that discovering the library and wading through the stacks is one of the most valuable learning experiences for students in the liberal arts ... and the more thorough a familiarity they have with traditional research, the better equipped they are to distinguish between genuinely useful web resources and, oh, I dunno ... someone's blog rants, for example.

Which is not to suggest that I bear absolute antipathy to resources like Wikipedia—on the contrary, it is a fabulously useful starting point when approaching a topic you have absolutely no familiarity with, or a tool to use to remind yourself of pesky details that have slipped your memory. Plus, the theory behind open-source software is really cool, and actually realizes some of the democratic potential touted back when the Web was in its infancy (oh, days of innocence).

Then there are the times Wikipedia is utterly reliable. This occurred to me when I did my zombie post a few days ago—in looking up all the zombie films made in the last eighty years, I had no qualms about Wikipedia's numbers. Why? Because this was a topic I was quite confident would have been combed over my many eyes. Why? Because of the very popularity of zombie films, and the quasi-obsessiveness of their many fans. The geek mindset, en masse, will ultimately arrive at a thoroughly and exhaustively vetted catalogue.

This realisation led me to formulate what will hopefully become a series of laws regarding internet-based research. Lockett's First Law of Internet-Based Research is thus as follows:

THE RELIABILITY OF A GIVEN WIKIPEDIA ENTRY IS IN DIRECT PROPORTION TO THE GEEKINESS OF THE TOPIC'S MOST PROMINENT AUDIENCE.

By way of explanation: we've probably all come across those oddly lengthy and exhaustive Wikipedia entries on random topics like, say, the Southern Spotted Corn Snake. And you just know that that entry was probably written by a biology grad student whose entire research corpus has been on the Southern Spotted Corn Snake. Which, ironically, makes it authoritative from a scholarly perspective, but not an open-source perspective—lacking, as it does, dozens of other people to comb through it and fix whatever points, minor or major, the author got wrong.

Conversely, when approaching a topic with a huge and obsessive number of interested people—Star Trek, let's say—we can be pretty close to absolutely certain that every item entered on the variety of wiki-pages dedicated to it will have been subjected to the scrutiny of hundreds of thousands of hairy eyeballs, who will correct (probably in high dudgeon) the spelling of Deforest Kelly to DeForest Kelley and point out that Sulu fenced with an epée and not a foil (that may be incorrect).

This does, however, lead us to the corollary rule that the more reliable a Wikipedia entry, the greater the likelihood of that topic's essential triviality. Ah, well ...

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I sometimes think fondly of that naïve time back when the InterWebs were the New Big Thing. Remember that innocent age? Bill Clinton was was a loyal and faithful husband still; Jean Chretien was set to be Prime Minister For Life; some cheerful lads from Seattle taught us about the aesthetic pleasures of secondhand flannel shirts and crushing nihilism; some people predicted that the digital economy would result in the end of work; it seemed as though any basement-dwelling slacker with a smattering of HTML could pilot a dot com startup and make millions; the words "tech" and "bubble" were never contiguous; and, most gloriously, the newly-connected world of the World Wide Web (a term people stilled used unironically in the same breath as "information superhighway") was going to lead us to a golden age of democratized information and knowledge that would free us from the constraints of our bodies and allow us to commune with the minds of others in the Digital Utopia.

Remember that time? Really, we should have paid more attention to Mike Godwin.

The Mike Godwin, that is, who formulated Godwin's Law. This brilliant insight, originally made in 1990, is as follows: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1." Though I didn't know it at the time, this was the response I wanted to have for the various Digital New Agers and New Gnostics who saw the Internet as the Promised Land. It seemed too good to be true: whatever the democratic vistas were offered by the wired world, it was inevitable that human nature would assert itself.

Godwin saw it. What it is about comment threads that bring out the crazies? A brief perusal of YouTube comment threads is often enough to smother my faith in humanity with a pillow. I used to read the comics online, but anything more political than Ziggy would inspire ranting, ad hominem attacks, and of course the requisite comparison of one's opponent to Hitler in the comments section (a comments section for a comics web site? Why?). When I found I was reading the comments more than the comics (and therefore wasting more time than the thirty seconds it took to read Doonesbury, Non Sequitur, and Bloom County reruns), I stopped altogether.

Comment threads are however hard to avoid, and can suck you in before you even realize you've just spent twenty minutes reading the argument between DemonGirl23 and jerseyboy about Obama's birth certificate. And what's appalling is that, more often than not, what sucks you in is not the intelligence and insightfulness of the debate, but its extreme and toxic rhetoric. In other words, that twenty minutes you just wasted is not mitigated by having learned something; it is genuinely wasted time in which any optimism you might have had about the human beings' basically decent nature has been thoroughly dashed.

What did I read recently to inspire this post, you ask? The conservative blogger and pundit Michael Medved wrote a post yesterday on TownHall.com that calmly and carefully explained why conservatives need to back away from the conspiracy theories that the Obama Administration is deliberately trying to destroy the U.S. economy so they can impose a communist regime. Medved, it should be noted, is as right-wing as they come; his post is not a defense of the President, but rather a rebuke to the hysterical right to stop being delusional. Some figures on the right, notably David Frum, have been making similar arguments, and have largely been given grief for their attempts to be reasonable (and when Medved and Frum are the voices of reason on the right, you know we've gone down the rabbit hole).

Rather predictably, the comments thread for Medved's post was pretty virulent. I saw exactly one response that could be construed as agreeing with him. If you have the stomach for it, you should check it out, but here are some highlights:

"You ... cannot come to grips with the reality of how radical Obama is. All one must do is listen to what he says. He wants to remake this country in his image and to do that he must first destroy the old country we have known for 200+ years."

"Medved is a hack and an Obama supporter, in disguise."

"[Y]ou are deluding yourself if you think Obama is pure-of-heart and that his differences with the majority of Americans can be attributed simply to ideology. He is a radical departure from past presidents, both in his intentions and methods.

"Medved has been corrupted by his Hollywood friends. There is no logic in his argument, derived from Sean Penn like nuttiness."

"Communism got routed in the Cold War, but the Reds in the west, and there are many, didn't just crawl under a rock and die. They came up with bulldung like global warming so that they could impose things like cap and trade."

"[Obama] like every extreme socialist liberal, hates America as our founders intended to be; he thinks his failed socialistic ideas are superior, and he is doing everything he can to implement them."

"The most significant, plain, simple truth here in answer to Medved's naïve question is Obama is at best of Muslim heritage. There cannot be a sane person alive who will argue that point ... Obama is a Muslim – period."

"Whats it going to take to convince you, Medved that Obama is at least a Socialist and probably a Marxist? A hammer and sickle waving over the White House? Just remember this; the German people never thought Hitler and his cronies would do the things they did."

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaand ... there it is. It was when I got to the last one here that I snapped out of my reverie and stopped reading. Good times.

(All that being said, I do encourage comments).