[WEB4LIB] Re: NPR Commentary About WIKIs

[Chuck0]

Alain D. M. G. Vaillancourt wrote:

> Hello!
> 
> I would like to amend your comment on Wikipedia.
> 
> I would say that it has a surprisingly big number of accurate articles
> but I would certainly not say that as a whole it is surprisingly
> accurate.  Most of the articles are stubs:  Too short or even tiny to
> be considered accurate or not. Many of the big or medium sized articles
> are wildly inaccurate.

I've written several negative reviews of Wikipedia on my blog, but I'd 
have to say that, overall, Wikipedia is a very useful and exciting 
project. In recent months I've been copying Wikipedia content over to 
several wikis on my website (in order to seed the database) and I've 
been impressed with the overall quality and depth of Wikipedia.

On the other hand, as Alain points out, Wikipedia has credibility 
problems, mostly when it comes to controversial articles. The entry on 
"anarchism" is pretty good for the most part, but a small group of 
so-called "anarcho-capitalists" (an oxymoron) have been rewriting the 
entry to normalize their ideology as having been part of anarchism and 
anarchist history. Ironically, this is an example of why Wikipedia needs 
some kind of "authority" mechanism, perhaps a clutch of benevolent Linus 
Torvalds to step in and make decisions. The anarcho-capitalists trying 
to graft their nonsense onto the "anarchism" entry is like the 
Scientologists trying to rewrite the entry on "Catholicism" to make it 
appear that L Ron Hubbard was a pope at one time.

I found another problem yesterday with the entry on "Rachel Corrie," the 
American activist woman who was killed by a bulldozer last year in 
Palestine. The entry had a surprisingly neutral pint of view, for the 
most part, but as one person pointed out, the entry was dominated by the 
debate about the circumstances of her death.

But Wikipedia offers a suprisingly amount of depth and quality 
information that can't be found as easily elsewhere online.

Chuck Munson
Webmaster and Librarian, Infoshop.org
http://www.infoshop.org
Blog: http://chuck.mahost.org/weblog/