[Web4lib] Problems with Wikipedia

[Deborah Kaplan]

On Thu, 4 Jan 2007, Meredith Farkas wrote:
> The Wikipedia is far more trustworthy than most
> Websites for the simple fact that anyone who is knowledgeable about a topic
> can come in and fix inaccuracies.

I wouldn't phrase it quite this way, and I say this as someone
who was a dedicated Wikipedia editor for many months.  (I stopped
not because of any flaws in Wikipedia, but because I'd become
what that community terms a "wikiholic", editing 4 or 5 hours
every night.  Yikes!)

The Wikipedia is more trustworthy than the web as a *whole*, but
part of teaching information literacy is teaching students how to
assess the quality of a given website.  So I'd say that the
State Department website is more authoritative than Wikipedia for
issues pertaining to its policies, as an example. Moreover,
Wikipedia is often inaccurate in matters of opinion, even when
those opinions are phrased with Wikipedia's famed NPOV (Neutral
Point of View) wording.

I occasionally turn to Wikipedia in reference interviews, and I
always make it clear to students why I am doing so: because
neither the student nor I have enough information about the topic
being researched to do a thorough search. We turn to Wikipedia in
order to look for more search terms will help us broaden or
narrow our search in sources which we know to be reliable.

It's also important to know in what areas Wikipedia excels.
Politics, science, and popular culture are areas which are very
well covered and monitored. While I would never a student to use
Wikipedia as a cited source in an academic paper, there are these
three are the areas in which I am comfortable considering it
authoritative in all but the most formal contexts.

It's true, though, that even those who are quite comfortable
understanding Wikipedia's limitations are much less likely to
understand the limitations in other web resources. A friend of
mine consistently trusts the IMDB over Wikipedia, even though the
IMDB is also frequently inaccurate, and its more closed editing
policies make inaccuracies far less likely to get fixed. I
believe Wikipedia's openness about its limitations is a real
boon, because it makes users more skeptical about the
information.

-Deborah
-- 
Deborah Kaplan
Digital Initiatives Librarian
Brandeis University