[Web4lib] Problems with Wikipedia

[TUCKER-RAYMOND Caleb]

This has been a great discussion, and it inspires me to crawl out from
my hole and make some points that I think have been ignored. 

I will not deny that Wikipedia is loathsome, there's no need to re-hash
any of that.

But Wikipedia's greatest strength is precisely that it is not
authoritative. Authority is summarily thrown out of the window.
Personally, I've edited dozens of pages, but it doesn't matter which - I
am not the author of any of them.

It's a different sort of resource, and if libraries and their parent
institutions are stuck on the idea that a resource can only have value
if it is classified as fiction or if it is authoritative, that's just
one more thing that needs to change.

Wikipedia works on the idea that accuracy and quality are best achieved
through group discussion and collective cognition, though I'm having a
hard time finding this stated explicitly anywhere on wikipedia.org (darn
that community).

I'm stealing the words "collective cognition" from Phil Agre's article,
"The End of Information & The Future of Libraries" in Progressive
Librarian, Issue number 12/13, Spring/Summer 1997,
http://www.libr.org/pl/12-13_Agre.html (thanks, Rory ->
http://libraryjuicepress.com/blog/?p=47). 

Agre writes (again, in 1997):

"Emerging technologies allow communities to think together. The fact
that cancer patients can think together is already turning medicine
inside-out. The fact that customers in computer-related markets talk
intensively to one another on the Internet is increasing the amount and
variety of information in the marketplace. The future, in my view,
belongs not to information but to this active process of collective
cognition in communities."

The future of libraries, that is, as per the title of the article. The
age when the scope of information literacy only included finding and
evaluating information is finished. Literacy implies writing as well as
reading.

So then, in my mind, libraries' role vis a vis Wikipedia is to show
people how to contribute. It's the only way anyone can fully grasp how
the information on the site is created; from there, we can begin to
evaluate it's value.

Caleb Tucker-Raymond
Oregon Statewide Digital Reference Project Coordinator
Multnomah County Library
(503) 988-5438
AIM/Y!: calebMCL
www.oregonlibraries.net