IS WIKIPEDIA THE MOST RELIABLE SOURCE ON THE INTERNET?

Wikipedia is a fascinating corner of the web—a font of knowledge that leads to unexpected places. But as any teacher or professor will tell you, it’s not a primary source. Use it as a jumping-off point, but scroll to the bottom and seek out original sources for the “truth.”

- S.C. STUART

Is that really fair, though? Is Wikipedia indeed a repository for half-truths? It’s a topic that Professor Amy Bruckman from the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Interactive Computing has researched extensively and examines in her book Should You Believe Wikipedia?, coming out in 2022 from Cambridge University Press.

Her conclusions may surprise you. Ahead of a September keynote at IntelliSys 2021, we spoke to Professor Bruckman, a Harvard grad who holds a PhD from the MIT Media Lab, about how to test assumptions—and the definition of truth and existence—in an era of misinformation.

PCMag: Before we get to Wikipedia, your wider research focuses on the field of “social computing,” which includes ethics, research, content creation and moderation, and social movements. When did you first encounter web-based communities?

Professor Amy Bruckman: Around 1990, I was a grad student at the MIT Media Lab, and my friend Mike Travers showed me a model of MIT in a multiuser, text-based virtual world. He had programmed a bot of his advisor, Marvin Minsky. Virtual Marvin would automatically start off in his office in the Media Lab, walk across campus to a classroom, and deliver a lecture at the correct time Tuesdays and Thursdays, reading a chapter of his book, Society of Mind. It was magic. I was hooked.

And was that when you built your first multi-user real-time world?

Yes, that was when I built MediaMOO, a multi-user text-based world designed to be a professional community for media researchers. Then my dissertation project was a virtual world for kids called MOOSE Crossing, where kids built the world together and learned object-oriented programming and practiced their creative writing.