What to Do With Wikipedia

Online, Mar/Apr 2008 by Badke, William

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.comedyeentrai.com/motherlo ad/in dex.jhtml?ml_vide o=24 039). 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 "folks o no my," 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.

We know from history that prohibition is not a viable means to control consumption of "bad" things. This is especially the case for Wikipedia if information professionals are sneakily using it themselves. Like the 1930s war on alcohol, a ban on Wikipedia would mean far more losses than gains.

THE DUMBING DOWN OF THE ACADEMIC WORLD

Academia has an edge too-its expertise, built upon years of study at a depth most people can scarcely imagine. The elites of the academic world have a message for the rest of us: "We are the people who know things. If you want to know things, you have to come to us."

But notice how very analog that is, just as much of academia remains analog and simply has not bought into the amazing power of the digital Information Age. For most academics, peer review and print publication are a mainstay. True, academia has made concessions to digital reference sources, electronic full text, and open access. But all of this is simply an electronic format for an analog world in which most of what is available as electronic full text has a counterpart print version. Even those peer-reviewed, open access, online-only journals are produced by the same principles as print production-submission to an editor, peer review, and publication in tidy volumes and issue numbers.

Wikipedia is an affront to academia, because it undercuts what makes academics the elite in society. In saying that, I am not condemning academia. Unless there are people with required training who can produce knowledge by required standards, the whole academic enterprise falls apart. Thus, the academic world could justly believe that Wikipedia is an assault upon its very reason for being. Wikipedia doesn't depend on elite scholars. There's no peer review, except after the fact by volunteer watchdogs. No editors, no easy-to-find revision dates (unless you know to click on the "History" tab). In fact, the article I read this morning may be very different when I go back to later this afternoon.