[WEB4LIB] Re: Co-founder of Wikipedia talks about problems

[Ryan Eby]

As someone that uses Wikipedia (and sister sites) often and would
probably be considered part of the "generation shift" away from print
media I'll chime in on why I use it.

For starters, almost no teachers in my years of schooling will allow
encyclopedias to count as a source. Back in grade school and the like,
there were always a required number of sources and encyclopedias
didn't count towards it. As you can imagine I've learned not to use or
rely on them.

Second I'm not the kind of person that trusts any one source, be it an
encyclopedia, website or book by "experts". I try to find as much
information as possible, preferably spanning a length of time so I can
see if interpretations have changed.

So with that in mind I use Wikipedia for many reasons but here are the
main ones:

Constantly updated: Some of the topics I research are rather new or
information about it changes constantly. Wikipedia tends to have some
very recent information and the history function allows me to see what
changes have been made.

References: Most of the information I have looked up have had a good
amount of references for information on the topic compared to other
encyclopedias. I use wikipedia as a starting point for research. As
previous posters have mentioned doing, I go to figure out some good
keywords or related concepts. I've found wikipedia links between
topics much more than other encyclopedias.

Open Access: If someone asks me for an example of something I can
usually be sure if I send them a URL from wikipedia that they will be
able to access it. This isn't always the case with library resources.
Sometimes it's hard for me to tell why I have access to certain things
when I follow a link from the library.

Breadth of coverage: Being open to everyone, I've often found topics
that weren't in the other encyclopedias I looked at. A recent example
was an explanation of Feynman Diagrams that a friend wanted an example
of.

Multiple viewpoints: I've used the discussion and history of items in
the past to figure out what some of the misconceptions, problems,
controversy, etc. about a topic might be. This can really help with
research sometimes.

In general I wouldn't call Wikipedia a endpoint in research but as a
starting point I probably couldn't ask for much more. It works well
with my style of thinking. As for the fear of people using it as a
sole point of research I have my doubts as I think I would fail any
course in which I used it as a primary source. Perhaps I'm overly
optimistic.

Ryan Eby