I was sooooo going to post about the “Shock Horror: Wikipedia Vandalism” story in yesterday’s commuter “newspaper” MX but Jeremy beat me to it. However, reading a discarded copy of MX on the train into the city last night got me thinking about the hypocrisy evident in the publishing of David Hastle’s hard-hitting expose. (If anyone knows how to type an ‘e’ with an accent on one of these computer machines can you drop me a comment, please?)

I’ve been fighting hard in my classroom this year to have my students gather and analyse information a bit more critically. If the students are researching, for example, Australian federation, they’ll go straight to Wikipedia, cut-and-past, print it out, and declare their research complete. You should’ve seen the look on their faces when I sat them down in front of the computer to watch me make a nonsense edit to an important Wikipedia article (I reversed that nonsense edit, of course. What do you think I am?) Given that the Wikipedia edit referred to in the MX story was made by somebody using the IP address of Hartlepool Sixth Form College in England, I’d say a lot of students around the world are conscious of the likely veracity of information on Wikipedia.

But despite all this I still let my students use Wikipedia. I think it’s an important and useful source of information, as long as it is used critically and in unison with other sources of information. This sensible approach to gathering and synthesising knowledge in our world is undermined every time a newspaper publishes a stupid story about “Oh My God The Intertubes Are Evil and Wikipedia Can Be Edited By ANYBODY! I’m looking at you too, The Age.

Scanning through the rest of MX I was struck by how much of the content was probably advertising masquerading as something else. There was a story without a byline advertising a new MySpace news service with the URLs in bold. There was a vox pop section where three punters on the street were asked “what’s your favourite restaurant in Melbourne” and two of them — completely coincidentally, I’m sure — provided the same answer. I’ve probably read a dozen issues of MX in the past year or two and there’s always something dodgy like that going on in every one.

I could bang on about how MX should declare this advertising content as such but part of me believes that it is up to the consumer of the “newspaper” to work out what they’re reading. I mean, it’s offered for free, contains very little actual journalism, and has to make a profit somehow. When I read MX I accept it for what it is: an easy-to-read and mildly interesting book of wire service celebrity gossip and advertisements disguised as news. Something to kill those 15 minutes between Flinders St and Brunswick stations if your iPod battery is dead. I’m sure that if the publishers of MX were asked to justify their slippery grasp of journalistic ethics they would use consumers’ understanding of these facts as a defence.

So why does MX presume that consumers of Wikipedia, a website that doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a community-edited online encyclopedia, lack the critical literacy skills required to properly consume MX?

Oh, the humanity.