Heath Chapel? More Like 'Cheap Shrapnel!'

Sources are the lifeblood of Wikipedia. They lend credibility to the information proposed by the article, situates the information within a context, and gives the reader the ability to locate further information on a given topic. Wikipedia is, inherent in its use as a publicly edited encyclopedia, reliant on an ample supply of sources to give it some means of truthfulness… Without it, Wikipedia would be a groundless collection of assertions written by non-experts (as well as experts, but that information is given no special designation). It is clear that these sources are responsible for a large majority of the information contained on Wikipedia, but not every article is cited in the same way. Just because the information is taken from another place on the internet, book, speech, interview, or article, does not make it entirely correct. Sometimes information can be taken completely out of context or repurposed in a way that is biased or untruthful. Most of this fallacious information is  removed or remediated by professional Wikipedia editors, but sometimes such a practice is left up to the reader. How would the untrained eye be able to decipher between sources that are legitimate, and sources that are not?

For the purpose of this analysis, I use a Wikipedia article titled ‘Heath Chapel’. The article about the Heath Chapel, a chapel that was built in the 12^th century in Ludlow, England. The article is very short and strictly informational, electing to focus of the architecture and its brief history. There are very few religious statements made about the Chapel, other than that it was "the perfect example of a rich little Norman chapel" and a short reference made to a painting of “The Last Judgment” behind the altar. There are relatively no large topics of argumentation concerning the Heath Chapel, and it seems that the general population would have few reasons to maliciously portray or place a bias on the information in the article- as a result, the historic Heath Chapel seemed a good subject with ample sources in which we could analyze for legitimacy.

For an article of such short length, the article has a decent amount of sources- four, to be exact. 3 were websites, and one was a book. For all intents and purposes, we are going to assume the information proposed in the book format is legitimate, for I have no way to looking at the text online or handling the book myself. The other three sources were situated within the internet, but I will further split this into two sections: scholarly sources and questionable sources. 

The one questionable source I looked into was on a website called “The Churches of England;” a resource to find local Christian communities in England. The webpage held no information other than an address- not a picture, not a description, not a single word written about the history. The source seemed to only exist to bolster the Heath Chapel’s existence as a religious (and historically Christian) building. The webpage within of itself was not for scholarly uses, although the Wikipedia page does use it to correctly place the Heath Chapel in Ludlow, England. I have listed this website as questionable because there is no reason to believe that The Churches of England fact checks their information or shows how they retrieved it – if there was any information to be fact checked or retrieved. 

As I previously stated, some things that Wikipedia mentions a lot when speaking about ‘identifying reliable sources’ are poor reputations of fact checking, lack of editing, and self-published sources. This is not of a concern when looking at the remaining two scholarly sources used in the Heath Chapel article. One was the website for the National Heritage List England, one was British History Online, both of which are maintained by the government for a scholarly and educational purpose (shown by the designation of a “.uk” domain rather than “.com”). They are kept as records, which are to be updated as needed and checked for accuracy. Both sources list their own sources as well, to prove their own legitimacy. Furthermore, both websites include much more information about the Heath Chapel than is contained in the Wikipedia article, which leads me to lead some information was purposefully left out to leave the Wikipedia strictly factual and untouched by any bias which may have been contained in it’s history. After fact checking the two sources (yes, the Wikipedia article, English Heritage List and British History Online agreed that the Heath Chapel is supported by buttresses and the communion rails were built in the 17^th century), these two websites have proved the legitimacy of their information. Wikipedia possibly includes both of these scholarly sources, which contain such similar information, to further elaborate the truthfulness of the information. 

So, ¾ of the articles sources are trustworthy and well-respected… But how is that information applied?  Is it utilized in a way that is truthful and honest? The writers of the articles are not creating an emotional argument as much as they are presenting logical information- as Jones would think of it, an appeal relying strictly on ethos and logos would be unbalanced and would eventually falter. In this case, the argument would have to rely on fallacies in order to prove any sort of point. However, the writers of the articles strive to situate the argument within the lower stases- that of definition- leaving the job of questioning value and policy to those who use their information. The use of fallacies, or questions of value at all, are rendered useless. Referring back to the title of this post, Wikipedia entirely had the ability to promulgate fallacious information- but makes a large attempt to stop these fictitious and biased stories from entering the web. The rest is left up to us, an active and engaged reader. The article about the Heath Chapel remains a reliable source of information, fulfilling the very purpose it was created for.