It’s fantastic for trivia and satisfying curiosity (and often addictive; who here has clicked on meaning to look up one thing, then you click a link within that article, then next thing you know an hour’s elapsed and you’re reading about provincial flags of Switzerland? Not me, of course). It’s fun.
It’s not completely useless for real academic research, because the better-documented articles are great places to find relevant articles and journals and whatnot which will stand up to academic scrutiny. I once interned at a weekly paper as a fact-checker, and they more or less wallpapered the interns’ desks with big signs saying “WIKIPEDIA IS NOT A VALID SOURCE!”
I think it’s absolutely wonderful, and 99% of the time the information there is perfectly acceptable for my needs (I’m not an academic nor into academic frou frou). In the case that I needed some incredibly important, life-changing information, I would still probably consult it - but would be sure to get other sources as well.
I wonder if there has ever been a greater (in the sense of “more widespread” and also “more information collected”) collaborative effort. Ever. Anywhere.
> Sometimes it is easy to catch the lies. I remeber one time a person wrote that
> Micrsoft was a “faggot” company.
You are aware, I hope, that this sort of statement in a Wikipedia entry is vandalism. Check the article where this appeared. You’ll notice that this sentence is no longer there. Some people get their kicks putting deliberate mistakes or insults in a Wikipedia page. This is usually noticed within a few hours and changed back. Wikipedia has people who are, in effect, editors who have the right to eliminate deliberate nonsense that’s been introduced into Wikipedia. They can lock the article so it can’t be messed with and they can ban the people who introduce such nonsense from ever contributing to Wikipedia again if they think it would be necessary.
These deliberately nonsensical entries are actually some of the lesser problems of Wikipedia. These are actually fairly rare and usually quite obviously nonsense. Usually you can pick out this stuff just by checking the article a day or so later.
Just to clarify, ANYONE, even people without a username, can correct vandalism. I frequently do. However, only certain users can lock articles, delete articles and ban folks.
Or just editing it out yourself. Once I was reading a perfectly innocent and well-written article on something (I don’t even remember what), when out of the blue this sentence popped into a paragraph that said something like: “JOHN IS A HOMO WITH A SMALL PENIS!”
It made me laugh only because it took me totally by surprise and woke me up a bit. Then I edited it out.
A few years back, on the old AOL Straight Dope forum, I got into a discussion with some other users. I don’t really remember the subject of the debate, but I recall at one point I had cause to state how many votes a particular 19th century Presidential candidate had received. One of the other posters challenged my figure, saying I had gotten the number wrong. So I cited the source of my information - a mainstream almanac from a respectable publisher. And then other guy cited his figure - also from a mainstream almanac, albeit a different one. And the two figures were different by about 50,000 votes. They were different enough that a minor printing error was unlikely. And the election had been over for a century so it was unlikely there had been any recent updates on the vote tally. So we realized that we had no way of determining which of our figures was the correct one (assuming either was).
My point is that if either of us had just been looking up that election result, we would have looked it up in either almanac and just assumed it the figure given was correct. Both were supposedly “valid sources” that anyone would have used and cited and accepted as an authority.
Now, whenever I hear somebody saying that Wikipedia can’t be cited as an authoritative source because you have to get information from a “real” reference, I think back on those two almanacs and wonder who’s kidding who.
I think of it as a real world Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The concept of the Guide as described in the book was something I couldn’t even imagine. Now I see Adams underestimated its true potential.
Well, I do understand that people edit articles and such. That’s how the site works. My point is that the information in any given article will be pretty damned correct.
That last point cuts right to the heart of the matter. On one hand, you have a group of people that have studied an event. On the other hand, you’ve got someone who lived through that event.
Why? Yes, a Wiki article can be biased, but so can a book.
Wiki is no more and no less a valid source than an article or a book. Neither are any good without cites, both can be garbage. Yes, Wiki can be hacked but so can an online article.
There is no reason whatsoever to distrust Wiki over any other source. It is a source, and needs to be treated like any other.
I think the reason Wikipedia is so mistrusted is the anonymity of its contributors, but anyone who summarily dismisses it has certainly thrown the baby out with the bathwater.
I understand the need for rigour and citation in reference works, but to be honest, I think a lot of scholarly people dismiss it simply because they’re so far up their own arses, they can almost see daylight.
I think I misread your post as “some of the entries may be muddled”, when what you actually said was “some of the entries may be muddled with”. I agree that in purely factual terms, Wikipedia is usually reliable.
My Open University course goes with your thinking, they’ve banned Wikipedia as a source (the only ban they’ve made) to reference but have advised that it may be a spring board of sorts to other articles.
For popular culture Wikipedia seems pretty good, for all else it ranks about as well as popular science magazines.
I think, though, that we describe some people as professionals for a reason. Professors, journalists, etc. can all be tracked down and held accountable for shoddy or inaccurate work. Wikipedia contributors can not.
One of the days my mother, a thirty-year journalist, says she remembers most vividly is having to deal with the fallout of misspelling someone’s name in their obituary. Imagine the kind of attention to detail you would start to pay your work after a screwup like that, and contrast it with the abandon with which people can put things on Wikipedia. Pehaps the point became moot, though, when the same news anchors who report on terrorist attacks and child molestations report live from the scene of Paris Hilton’s DUI.
I view it as a good starting point when looking for information. If it is idle curiosity I may read the article and leave it there. For other research, it is only a starting point and I try to verify everything I have read there. I have found some things to be inaccurate, enough so that I don’t consider it an end.
I’ve cited Wikipedia in an appeal brief to provide general background on a historical point, while also citing a full, book-length treatment of the subject.
I have no doubt that at least one of the appellate judges or their law clerks will punched up the Wikipedia entry and saw a concise summary of the historical point I was trying to make. I am equally confident that none of them went down to the public library to pull and read the book that I was citing.
Were the point central to my brief, I would use a lot more authoritative sources, but for a general background point that can be accessed without lifting one’s backside from one’s desk chair, it is quite useful.
There’s one reason – I’d say quite an obvious one – that teachers, editors, etc., are anxious about Wiki. Even if it were highly vetted and authoritative, it is just too damn easy. Most researchers in positions of authority today came up in an era when the world didn’t yield its knowledge quite so readily.
Another thing no one has mentioned about Wiki: the graphics are amazing. I look forward to the picture of the day more than the article of the day–not only is their great nature photography, but there are animations of all sort of mechanical and physical properties and historic photographs. I don’t know why Wiki is so much better at this than “random guy put up a webpage” ever was, but the charts and graphs and animations and such are first rate.
