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Re: Wikipedia?

This does remind me of the story of the two watches. One of them tells you the absolutely correct time, twice a day; the other never tells you the correct time. Which watch do you trust? It helps if you know that the first watch is broken and the second just 5 minutes fast.

The comprehensiveness and up-to-date-ness of Wikipedia compensates for its small inaccuracies, especially if you can't find at all what you're looking for in traditional reference sources (which are by no means flawless, either). With few exceptions, is it not better to be somewhat informed than absolutely ignorant?

Jan Velterop


On 18 Feb 2007, at 21:09, Karl Bridges wrote:

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