WHAT TO DO WITH WIKIPEDIA?

By William Badke, Trinity Western University - from Information Today.

If you want to get five opinions from four information professionals, just mention Wikipedia. Often banned by professors, panned by traditional reference book publishers, and embraced by just about everyone else, Wikipedia marches on like a great beast, growing larger and more commanding every day. With no paid editors and written by almost anyone, it shouldn’t have succeeded, but it has. In fact, it’s now emerged as the No. 1 go-to information source in the world. It’s used not only by the great unwashed but also by many educated people as well. ONLINE reported on the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s findings that 36% of the American population regularly consult Wikipedia (July/August 2007, p. 6).

Admit it—you use Wikipedia too. Someone comes to you wanting to know how to find some good stuff on quantum physics, so you sneak a peak at the relevant Wikipedia article just so you won’t sound stupid to your patron. Or someone queries, “What year did George Washington die?” and you could look it up in Oxford Reference, but you don’t. I mean, even Wikipedia couldn’t get the date of George Washington’s death date wrong, could it?
Maybe the newer, supposedly more reliable Citizendium (http://en.citizendium.org/) will provide a better alternative, but the standards for Citizendium article production are not much higher than those for Wikipedia. Moreover, Wikipedia remains the online encyclopedia of choice for users.

Some Just Don’t Like It
There are detractors. I know of any number of professors who will not allow a Wikipedia article to appear in a student’s research paper. Wikipedia is labeled as shallow, unreliable, sometimes slanderous, and too often dead wrong. On a more philosophical note, Wikipedia is viewed as the child of our postmodern age in which “truth” is measured by how many people believe something.
The satirist Stephen Colbert introduced the term “Wikiality” (truth by consensus) to poke fun at the concept that if enough people support a Wikipedian statement it becomes true (The Colbert Report, July 30, 2006; www.comedycentral.com/motherload/index.jhtml?ml_video=72347).

This is closely related to another term Colbert created: “truthiness” (The Colbert Report, Oct. 17, 2005; www.comedycentral.com/motherload/index.jhtml?ml_video=24039). Researchers at the University of California at Santa Cruz have created software that uses the measures of age of an entry and number of edits to gauge reliability of articles (the code was released on Dec. 14, 2007). But this, of course, only determines level of consensus (http://trust.cse.ucsc.edu/).
Which begs the question: If Wikipedia is so bad that we caution our students not to use it for academic work, how can it be so good that much of what you need to know is found there?

WikIpedia’s Edge
Though traditional encyclopedia producers disdain it, Wikipedia has an edge in one area—currency. If I want an article on “folksonomy,” I can’t find it in Encyclopaedia Britannica, whereas Wikipedia will instantly tell me that it is “a user-generated taxonomy used to categorize and retrieve web content…using open-ended labels called tags.” A month after the terrible Asian tsunami of Dec. 26, 2004, I found a very helpful Wikipedia article detailing what was known about what happened, why it happened, and the results (“2004 Indian Ocean earthquake”). As far as I could determine, it was all good stuff.
Wikipedia has another edge—millions of devoted users who simply don’t understand what all the fuss is about. They find reliable material (for the most part), get their questions answered (usually), and recognize how easy it is to use.

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