Page 206 - Between One and Many The Art and Science of Public Speaking

Chapter 7 Researching Your Message 173

tion or pay to view certain pages. Many traditional, hardcopy materials such
as newspapers, journals, magazines, dictionaries, and encyclopedias have been
converted to electronic format and are sold via the Deep Web.
Why should you care about the Deep Web and the Surface Web? If you are
using only the Surface Web for your research, then you may be locating only
information of limited value. The premium information that will add credibility
to your presentation may only be available online through Deep Web databases.
Information aggregators such as LexisNexis, Proquest, Factiva, and EBSCO
package and resell commercially produced information via the Deep Web. Of-
ten your college or local public library has subscriptions with such vendors, al-
lowing you to search, view, and save expensive information for free.
How do you know if you have access to such Deep Web sources? Most library
Web pages have guides that explain which premium online resources they pro-
vide. If you have a particular title in mind, such as The New York Times or The
Economist, you can often check your library’s online catalog to determine if a
resource is available either in hardcopy or electronically. These guides and cata-
logs may have “clickable” links that take you directly to the database containing
your title.
With that in mind, consider our most recent experience with Wikipedia, a
popular Surface Web site some of our students have cited as the source of infor-
mation conveyed in their speeches.
3
Wiki comes from the Hawaiian word for quick. The idea is that anyone can
wiki
quickly make a change in an entry they fi nd in Wikipedia and it will be instantly
The Hawaiian word for
available to all users. No one demands that the user document or substantiate quick. A Web site that
the edit. Recently one of us was checking out the entry for our university on allows users to edit
Wikipedia to learn what it said about our Speech and Debate team. He found content easily and
no mention of the team or its role. As the former debate coach, he was bothered quickly—for example,
by the omission; so, with a few keystrokes, he anonymously added to the history Wikipedia.
of the school that in 1948 “the speech and debate team was founded by Herbert
Rae, Speech & Drama Department Chair.”
Was this entry accurate? Given that the author was in diapers in 1948, it
wasn’t based on his personal knowledge. Rather, it was based on what he had
been told by a retired colleague. No one from Wikipedia could contact the au-
thor. Wikipedia only knows the IP address of the computer used to post the
information.
Unfortunately, not everyone who visits Wikipedia has such good intentions,
as the case of journalist John Seigenthaler Sr. (father of NBC’s current anchor
John Seigenthaler Jr.) illustrates. For 132 days in 2005, Wikipedia falsely re-
ported that John Seigenthaler Sr.

was the assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early 1960’s [sic]. For a
brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassina-
tions of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven. 4

As Seigenthaler senior recounts in an article for USA Today, no one knew who
had posted the false accusations. Even a call to Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy
Wales, failed to turn up the name of the perpetrator, since Wikipedia doesn’t
require contributors to reveal their identity. Further, because of the way the
Internet is interconnected, Reference.com and Answers.com posted the same