Insist on Sources:
Wikipedia, LLMs, and the Limits
of Information Literacy Instruction
Joel Blechinger, MA, MLIS
7 June 2024
bleching@ualberta.ca / https://www.jblechinger.ca/

Land Acknowledgement
I am presenting to you today from Calgary on the traditional territories of the
peoples of Treaty 7, which include the Blackfoot Confederacy (comprised of the
Siksika, the Piikani, and the Kainai First Nations), the Tsuut’ina First Nation,
and the Stoney Nakoda (including Chiniki, Bearspaw, and Goodstoney First
Nations).
The City of Calgary is also home to the Métis Nation of Alberta (Districts 5 and
6).

Wikipedia and GenAI Comparisons

Librarians have often stood at the precipice of massive
changes in information technology: the dawn of the fax
machine, the internet, Wikipedia and now the emergence of
generative artificial intelligence, which has been creeping its
way into classrooms (Coffey, 2023, para. 5)
As with any new technology, there will be people who are hesitant adopters. In the early 2000s, many librarians were skeptical
of students using Wikipedia. Now we realize that we need to be instructing students about the proper use of Wikipedia, rather
than banning it (James & Filgo, 2023, p. 336)

Wikipedia and GenAI Comparisons

As with any new technology, there will be people who are
hesitant adopters. In the early 2000s, many librarians were
skeptical of students using Wikipedia. Now we realize that we
need to be instructing students about the proper use of
Wikipedia, rather than banning it (James & Filgo, 2023, p. 336)
As with any new technology, there will be people who are hesitant adopters. In the early 2000s, many librarians were skeptical
of students using Wikipedia. Now we realize that we need to be instructing students about the proper use of Wikipedia, rather
than banning it (James & Filgo, 2023, p. 336)

Wikipedia and GenAI Comparisons

It’s hard to predict how AI tools will impact librarianship. In
many ways, ChatGPT reminds us of how society reacted to
other innovative developments including the invention of
calculators, cell phones, the World Wide Web, and Wikipedia
(Cox & Tzoc, 2023, p. 102).
As with any new technology, there will be people who are hesitant adopters. In the early 2000s, many librarians were skeptical
of students using Wikipedia. Now we realize that we need to be instructing students about the proper use of Wikipedia, rather
than banning it (James & Filgo, 2023, p. 336)

Beyond being narrativized as “crises”—requiring, of course, resilience and
adaptability (Blechinger, 2020) within academic librarianship and LIS’
technologically determinist self-understanding—is there more significant
commonality between these two moments?
As with any new technology, there will be people who are hesitant adopters. In the early 2000s, many librarians were
skeptical of students using Wikipedia. Now we realize that we need to be instructing students about the proper use of
Wikipedia, rather than banning it (James & Filgo, 2023, p. 336)

Is Information Literacy—or literacy in general—actually applicable to or useful in
the GenAI context?
As with any new technology, there will be people who are hesitant adopters. In the early 2000s, many librarians were
skeptical of students using Wikipedia. Now we realize that we need to be instructing students about the proper use of
Wikipedia, rather than banning it (James & Filgo, 2023, p. 336)

1.

Presentation
Overview

2.

3.

4.

Academic Librarianship and
the Challenge Posed by
Wikipedia in the Early
2000s/2010s
The Wikipedia and GenAI
Crisis Moments: Are They
Actually Comparable?
Wikipedia and GenAI:
Significant Differences in
Teaching Affordances
AI Literacy? A Few Closing
Provocations

Academic Librarianship and the Challenge Posed by Wikipedia in the Early
00s/10s
Historical concerns:
○

○
○

○
○

Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0

Wikipedia’s status as a freely editable encyclopedia and it,
therefore, not being a stable, reliable, authoritative
resource (Gorman, 2007; Luyt et al., 2010).
Editor anonymity and lack of accountability (Gorman, 2007;
Luyt et al., 2010).
Editors’ lack of credentials (or traditional “indicators of
authority”) and this contributing to the devaluation of
expertise (Gorman, 2007).
Students plagiarizing from Wikipedia (Germek, 2009).
Students’ use of Wikipedia prior to (or in total
replacement of) consulting librarians or traditional, print
library resources (Luyt et al., 2010).

Academic Librarianship and the Challenge Posed by Wikipedia in the Early
00s/10s
●

Speaking generally, Badke (2008) presciently anticipated how academic librarians
(and the academy more broadly) adapted to Wikipedia:
○

○

“The most daring solution would be for academia to enter the world of Wikipedia directly. Rather than
throwing rocks at it, the academy has a unique opportunity to engage Wikipedia in a way that
marries the digital generation with the academic enterprise” (p. 50).
Badke (2008) proposes that professors contribute to Wikipedia, have their students evaluate and
improve articles in class, and even contribute new articles to the site.

Academic Librarianship and the Challenge Posed by Wikipedia in the Early
00s/10s
●

●

●

Despite academic librarians’ initial apprehension, Wikipedia has proven to be useful
in IL teaching, in large part due to its transparency (Murley, 2008; McDowell &
Vetter, 2022).
Wikipedia pedagogy is well suited to teaching the ACRL Framework’s six frames
(McDowell & Vetter, 2022; Stine, 2022). It can include teaching about the peer
review process (Thomas et al., 2021), and Wikipedia editing activities with the aim
of increasing students’ IL skills have even been undertaken in the one-shot
instructional context (Oliver, 2014).
Initiatives like WikiEdu, GLAM-Wiki’s #1Lib1Ref (one librarian, one reference)
campaign, and many different edit-a-thons (Robichaud, 2016) have demonstrated a
strong affinity between Wikimedia’s ethos and contemporary academic
librarianship.

The Wikipedia and GenAI Crisis Moments: Are They Actually Comparable?
●

With the wide-scale popularization of GenAI tools in 2022, some drew
comparisons between the Wikipedia crisis moment and the current GenAI
crisis moment in academic librarianship, usually locating Wikipedia within a lineage
of technological innovations or disruptions to which librarians have unfailingly
adapted.

The Wikipedia and GenAI Crisis Moments: Are They Actually Comparable?

●

●
●

●
●

Historical concerns about Wikipedia

Contemporary concerns about GenAI tools:

Wikipedia’s status as a freely editable
encyclopedia and it, therefore, not being a
stable, reliable, authoritative resource
(Gorman, 2007; Luyt et al., 2010).
Editor anonymity and lack of accountability
(Gorman, 2007; Luyt et al., 2010).
Editors’ lack of credentials (or traditional
“indicators of authority”) and this contributing
to the devaluation of expertise (Gorman,
2007).
Students plagiarizing from Wikipedia
(Germek, 2009).
Students’ use of Wikipedia prior to (or in
total replacement of) consulting librarians
or traditional, print library resources (Luyt et
al., 2010).

●
●
●
●
●
●
●
●

The blackboxing of most popular GenAI tools and the
complexity of algorithmic “decision making” (Bagchi,
2023).
(Un)reproducibility of GenAI tools’ output (Ball, 2023).
Liquidation of authorship and attribution in GenAI
tools’ output (Blechinger, 2024) and related copyright
issues (Appel et al., 2023).
Bias in GenAI tools’ output (the GIGO principle:
“garbage in, garbage out”) (Ferrara, 2023).
The “hallucination”—or “fabrication”—problem in
GenAI tools’ output (Edwards, 2023).
The environmental cost of GenAI tool usage and
integration into different software products (Luccioni,
2023).
Students’ use of GenAI tools to bypass learning via
idea generation, text generation, etc. (Clark, 2024).
Students’ use of GenAI tools prior to (or in total
replacement of) consulting librarians or library
resources (Press, 2023).

The Wikipedia and GenAI Crisis Moments: Are They Actually Comparable?
●

●

Issues related to information quality, academic integrity, and librarian labour
persist across both crises, but, generally, we have moved from a human-centered
set of concerns to a largely non-human-centered one.
The easiest way to drive this point home is to consider how GenAI tools’ output
frustrates some common IL heuristics:
○
○
○

Mandalios’ (2013) RADAR, for example, commonly consists of relevance, authority, date, appearance
(or accuracy), and reason for writing (p. 473).
As I have detailed before (Blechinger, 2023), RADAR runs into problems when used to assess
GenAI output.
What would it mean for a GenAI tool to have a sufficient amount of authority? Or, what is the
“reason for writing” for a user-prompted GenAI tool?

Wikipedia and GenAI: Significant Differences in Teaching Affordances
Wikipedia’s Content Policies:
Neutral point of view (NPOV):
“Everything that our readers can see, including articles, templates, categories and portals, must
be written neutrally and without bias” (“Wikipedia: List of policies,” 2024).
No original research:
“Articles may not contain any unpublished theories, data, statements, concepts, arguments, or
ideas; or any new interpretation, analysis, or synthesis of published data, statements, concepts,
arguments, or ideas that, in the words of Wikipedia's co-founder Jimbo Wales, would amount to
a ‘novel narrative or historical interpretation’” (“Wikipedia: List of policies,” 2024).
Verifiability:
“Articles should cite sources whenever possible. While we cannot check the accuracy of cited
sources, we can check whether they have been published by a reputable publication and
whether independent sources have supported them on review. Any unsourced material may be
challenged and removed” (“Wikipedia: List of policies,” 2024).

“Insist on Sources”

“I really want to encourage a
much stronger culture which
says: it is better to have no
information, than to have
information like this, with no
sources.” (Wales, 2006)

Google’s AI Overview Feature

(Yang, 2024)
(roundbirbart, 2024)

(_Answer_42, 2024)

Transparency’s Importance

One of the major themes that pervade the qualitative data in regard to
learning with Wikipedia is that students found the transparency of Wikipedia
… to be incredibly helpful in understanding how it functions, and how they
experience many of the themes of the [ACRL] Framework. The transparency
that Wikipedia provides remains in stark contrast to how the majority of UGC
[user generated content] platforms function … If the transparency of
Wikipedia is key to garnering information literacy skills … we believe this
suggests that the lack of transparency of UGC platforms might be one of the
facts that begs further inquiry in regard to information literacy,
misinformation, and social justice. (McDowell & Vetter, 2022, pp. 8–9)
As with any new technology, there will be people who are hesitant adopters. In the early 2000s, many librarians were skeptical
of students using Wikipedia. Now we realize that we need to be instructing students about the proper use of Wikipedia, rather
than banning it (James & Filgo, 2023, p. 336)

Wikipedia and GenAI: Significant Differences in Teaching Affordances
Wikipedia’s Content Policies:
These policies are, of course, not perfect—and can be and have been problematized (see, for
example, Matei & Dobrescu, 2011 and O’Neil, 2011)—but they are at least legible to us in our
profession and reflect values that we share, broadly speaking, around knowledge
production and human sense-making.
These shared values and the platform’s transparency are what made it possible for us to adapt
to it and teach it—they enabled our extension of IL to the Wikipedia pedagogical
environment.
Any attempt at theorizing—and developing, whether in ourselves or in our users—what some
are calling “AI Literacy” (Wheatley & Hervieux, 2022; Pival, 2024) or “Algorithmic Literacy”
(Ridley & Pawlick-Potts, 2021; Archambault, 2023) has to proceed with a clear understanding of
where librarianship and LIS’ values are not in alignment with GenAI as a project.

AI Literacy?
A Few Closing Provocations
●

●

●

Logan (2024) has expressed ambivalence about literacy’s applicability to the GenAI
context due to both the opacity of GenAI tools and also Big Tech’s ability to
capture “literacy.” He instead proposes an “ecological framework that begins to
map some of [GenAI’s] social, technical, and political-economic relations” (p. 365).
To what extent are efforts to theorize—and proclaim a new era of—AI Literacy
premature? Do these efforts instead reflect our own professional investment in
the transcendent power of literacy—what Graff & Duffy (2014) have termed “the
literacy myth”—more than the applicability of literacy to GenAI?
Why does AI Literacy so often assume GenAI use? From a politics of refusal
perspective, can we conceive of an AI literate individual that does not want to use
GenAI tools?

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