RE: Wikipedia?

[Karl Bridges <Karl.Bridges@uvm.edu>]

Never has a single metaphor of mine created such a stir.

The article by Chesney you cite is intriguing, but it concludes 
that 13 percent of the articles contain mistakes.  The difference 
between the means of the articles credibility was only 
significant at the 10 percent level -- based on the responses of 
55 people in total. I'd also point out that the article was based 
on the responses of graduate students -- who, as the literature 
seems clear on, have different interests and information seeking 
behaviors than undergraduates.  I'd also point out that they may 
very well be, as Europeans, more sophisticated and better 
educated than the typical American undergraduate. I'm not saying 
they are.  I'm just saying we know little or nothing, from the 
article, about the survey group -- their education level, 
academic interests, level of information literacy training -- all 
of which may have impacted the results.  In short, I'm just not 
sure we can take the conclusions of this article and make an 
overall generalization from it.

The history of Wikipedia is interesting as is the fact that 
people are attempting other projects similar to it but that 
information is irrelevant to the question of whether Wikipedia is 
accurate today.  You're mixing apples and oranges here -- if I 
may be allowed another metaphor.

As a professional reference librarian I still feel it would be 
inappropriate to recommend the use of Wikipedia to my users. For 
the fundamental reason that it does not, as it currently exists, 
in my view, meet acceptable standards for accuracy.  It certainly 
is an interesting model of distributed data collection, but 
that's about as far as I could go.  In particular, I think the 
fact checking on Wikipedia is questionable -- an issue that the 
article by Chesney doesn't address.

In the end I guess I just wonder what I'm supposed to compare 
Wikipedia to if not our traditional reference sources -- printed 
and electronic???  Either it's as good a resource as a 
traditional encyclopedia or it isn't.  And if it isn't don't I 
have a professional obligation to steer my patrons away from it 
towards the better source?

Karl Bridges
University of Vermont


Quoting "Sloan, Bernie" <bernies@uillinois.edu>:

> Karl Bridges likened Wikipedia to an "online version of a large
> white wall in the South Bronx with a bin of magic markers and
> spray paint next to it."
>
> While it may not be the "serious professional reference tool"
> that Karl wants to compare it to, Wikipedia is more than a "large
> white wall in the South Bronx". See, for example, Thomas
> Chesney's "An empirical examination of Wikipedia's credibility"
> in FirstMonday, volume 11, number 11 (November 2006)
> http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_11/chesney/index.html
>
> Karl also suggests that Wikipedia editing might be limited to "a
> paid staff who knew what they were doing". If my memory serves me
> correctly, Wikipedia started as a side project of Nupedia (which
> was an attempt to develop a professional level peer-reviewed
> online encyclopedia). While these editors were unpaid volunteers,
> they did know what they were doing. And I believe Nupedia fell by
> the wayside in about 2003. It was a business model that didn't
> seem to work very well. Larry Sanger, the original
> editor-in-chief of Nupedia, and one of the co-founders of
> Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales, is taking another stab at the
> concept of a resource with more editorial control than Wikipedia
> with his new Citizendium project (http://www.citizendium.org/).
>
> Bernie Sloan