Okay, so that comic doesn’t totally represent my feelings about Wikipedia. (They’re a little more nuanced than that.) But it does capture how strongly people feel about the site. There seems to be a pretty clear-cut dichotomy with Wikipedia: you either love it, or you hate it. “Seems” is the operative word, however, at least for librarians.
So, let’s say I’m a librarian (I am!), and let’s also say that I’m interested in learning more about something like Art Nouveau, or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Wikipedia is very likely going to be one of the first places I look. Because it’s an encyclopedia, I recognize that I’ll be able to find some good introductory material about any of those topics which will help me to establish a basic understanding. I also know that, while Wikipedia is developed collaboratively by a community of “average Joe” contributors, a lot those people genuinely want to provide accurate, authoritative, unbiased information. So, how do they accomplish that goal or, at least, attempt to accomplish it? Contributors check facts, review citations, and flag suspicious content; they uphold Wikipedia’s publication policies and guidelines; they serve as editors as well as writers.
Well, that sounds like a good setup. However, the difficulty with it is that there aren’t enough people involved who are willing or qualified or capable of playing content watchdogs and fact checkers. Most information that is published on Wikipedia is not checked for accuracy by another contributor. And, as it has been well-documented in the media, contributors can easily falsify their credentials and their sources. The system is not 100% reliable. (Anyone disagree with me?)
The whole purpose of Wikipedia is to produce reference information through a voluntary social network–which is a really cool social phenomenon–except that there’s no effective way to ensure that entries are created and edited using the same criteria that scholarly publications use.
So, what do you do with Wikipedia? Well, I use it for non-academic research needs, and I evaluate what I find. I fall very clearly into the I-love-Wikipedia category, so I can’t say, “Don’t use it.” But I will say, “Use your critical thinking skills when you do.”
~ Adriana
