[PW] wikipedia

[Bye, Dan J]

I've got a copy of Harvey's Einbinder's "The Myth of the Britannica" (http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/3833320), from the 1960s. It discusses the many scholarly faults to be found at that time in the heavily marketed Encyclopedia Britannica. Anyone who is interested in wikipedia and how it compares to other encyclopedias should first of all get hold of that and read it as a reminder of things.    When I was at library school in the early 1990s, I remember one lecturer commenting that you'd be better off with a larger range of individual reference works rather than relying on an Encyclopedia - given the problems of currency etc with such beasts.  These days, when Encyclopedias can be updated more easily digitally, and you can get, say, Britannica very cheaply on CD-Rom, the advice might be different.

We need to have a very clear understanding of what Wikipedia is, and how it works.  For librarians, surely, the key thing is *evaluation*, rather than blanket praise or condemnation.    One interesting point is that the rules Wikipedia operates by give its rhetorical style a very particular character.  Contributors cite guidelines at each other and fight their way to something which is acceptable to the community of editors at the time.

Like Britannica, there are often partisan arguments about an article's content. Unlike Britannica (unless it makes the newspapers), you get to know what the areas of disagreement are around Wikipedia articles by reading the discussion pages. And unlike Britannica, it is easy to compare versions of articles.

Unlike Britannica, Wikipedia tries to avoid biased "point of view"s, whereas Britannica's authors are not afraid to make judgements.  On the other hand, in avoiding POV in Wikipedia, you can end up with articles which preserve tenuous allegations.   Britannica writers will try to decide what is true, or at least weigh up pros and cons and provide some discussion.  Wikipedia won't do that because every significant assertion requires a source. And of course editors are not able to *evaluate* the sources in the text, because that would be POV. Articles can tend to get purged of any evaluative content whatsoever, and are entirely summative.

A Britannica article might give you a better idea of a how a subject looks in overview - what the important ideas are. Wikipedia often overemphasises minority views within a broader area.  On the other hand, emphasising minority views can be an advantage.

A good example is the vampire watermelons/pumpkins page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire_watermelon. Everything is documented and sourced, but it's such an obscure and largely unimportant subject that you wonder whether giving it its own page isn't really a POV exercise in itself because it makes it seem significant and important when it really isn't.  On the other hand, so long as you know that, who cares?

Understanding how Wikipedia differs from other sources, and other encyclopedias, will give you some insight into its strengths and weaknesses and what its value as a reference tool really is.

I wouldn't recommend that someone cites wikipedia (unless they're studying wikipedia, or something like that), but I wouldn't recommend they completely ignore it, either.

Dan