[WEB4LIB] NPR Commentary About WIKIs

[Alain D. M. G. Vaillancourt]

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 have been doing volunteer work on Wikipedia since October of last
year and while I would certainly point out Wikipedia as a technological
and social model of collaboratove work on the Web, I would not rate it
very highly as a whole, compared to any print or CD-based encyclopedia.

Take the bibliographical data in the articles for instance.  About
three months ago I spent a continuous period of 8 weeks checking all of
the incoming new articles for the ones that dealt with a monograph,
wether it was a novel or a piece of non-fiction or a lit anthology of
some kind. I would complete the bilbiographical data on the book and
make an entry in the Wikipedia list of artciles on books for it, to get
an idea of how much time it would take to ensure some form of minimal
bibliographical control in there. A very small minority dealt with the
book in a complete manner.  A tiny minority had enough bibliographical
data (author, title, publisher, year of publication) to give a good
identification.  Hardly any were done by people who took the trouble to
find out that Wikipedia has a list (by title) of articles dealing with
books, or a list of authors of the same books:  They just wrote up
their tiny article without taking the trouble to find out any of the
many ways Wikipedia had of organizing the articles.  Wikipedia has
scores of amazing ways to organize information but they are heavily
underused.

The situation was in many ways worse with the references to works
consulted in writing any article.  Only a few gave any at all.

But I continue doing volunteer work on Wikipedia becasue it is an
interesting Web phenomenon despite all its faults, and it makes me
learn things.

Alain V. --- Gerry Mckiernan <gerrymck at iastate.edu> a écrit : 
> Colleagues/
> 
>    In its All Things Considered program lat month, NPR broadcast a
> *Most Excellent* Commentary by 
> David Weinberger [http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/index.html ] on
> -WIKIs-  
> 
> July 21, 2003
> 
> It might sound a little crazy, letting just anyone write whatever
> they
> want on your Web site. But that's just what Wikis are designed for.
> Wikipedia.org, for example, lets the public collaborate to build a
> surprisingly accurate encyclopedia. Commentator David Weinberger says
> wikis are one example of "social software," intended to allow people
> to
> work together with ease.
> 
> [ http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=1344426  ]
> 
> This is Well-Worth The Listen!
> 
> Enjoy!
> 
> /Gerry 
> 
> Gerry McKiernan
> National Public Librarian
> Iowa State University
> Ames IA 50011
> 
> gerrymck at iastate.edu 
> 
> 
>  

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