Auditing a Wikipedia Article

This past week, I was place in a group of 4 pretty cool guys and we were assigned the tedious assignment of auditing a Wikipedia article about Polygamy in North America. My group consisted of Phil, Tom, Max, and Hussain. We all worked very well together, and got along nicely considering half of us did not know each other..

The breakdown consisted of the entire group coming over to my apartment and crafting a game plan on how to tackle the project. Tom initiated the idea of starting a Google documents account seeing that we all have Gmail accounts. This allowed all of us, even when apart, to edit the presentation with whatever suggestions we all had. To make sure we were all on the same page in terms of how to audit, and pin point exactly what we were suppose to be looking for, we decided to work on the first section of the article together. We found several discrepancies such as mismatched dates relative to the footnote [1] and an evident bias that did not talk about Mexico and very little about Canada. Another bias that we identified was that in the article, the authors mostly discuss males having multiple wives, and not the other way around.

After going over the first section, Phil created another Google word doc where we could add our suggestions and ideas about references and footnotes that we found problems or discretion with. With this, we parted and worked on each section by ourselves keeping in contact through text messages and the accessible document that Phil set up.

Again, the auditing process that we established as a group would go along the lines of this, 1. Read the article 2. Check reference list for dead links 3. Check existing sources against their claim 4. Determine bias within the article 5. Scan article for missing information. After that, we evaluated the source into 4 different categories. 1. Off-topic 2. Barely Relevant 3. Good Quality 4. Inaccessible.

After, separating the 36 different sources into their associated categories, we determined that the Wikipedia article proved a decent source to obtaining information about polygamy in North America. However, in terms of gaining comprehensive knowledge about the subject, the article did have several loose ends that did seem iffy. Some sources had dead links; some were based off of religious websites that were extremely skewed.