[Web4lib] Problems with Wikipedia

[Jonathan Rochkind]

Apparently many experienced 'wikipedians' operate under the assumption 
that the longer the article has been around, the more edits it has, and 
the MORE debate on the 'discussion' page it has---the more likely it is 
to be a 'good encyclopedia article'.  (Because if a lot of debate 
occured, it means what's on the page is probably the eventual 
consensus/compromise of debating parties, which means it's probably 
relatively 'balanced'. )

The idea of "wikipedia literacy" is a really interesting one. Many users 
probably don't even notice that they CAN look at the history or 
discussion pages, let alone that they are useful information for 
guessing as to the quality of an individual article.  There are surely 
all sorts of other criteria--some yet undiscovered--for using to judge 
the usefulness or trustworthiness of a wikipedia article, and of all 
these "new sources" which don't work like the sources we are used to.

These are exciting times for us, no?  It's part of our collective job to 
figure out these criteria, and then to help our users discover and use 
them, for all these 'new sources' that are appearing, right? Not just to 
discourage our users from using them.

Jonathan

Deborah Kaplan wrote:
>> On 1/4/07, Michael McCulley <drweb at san.rr.com> wrote:
>> I happen to still be in the credible author = non-anonymous camp
>>     
>
> A *good* Wikipedia article -- which is hardly to say most of them
> -- provides extensive footnotes, links, cited sources, and no
> unsourced opinions or original resource.  In that case, the
> information is coming from non-anonymous authors, as described on
> a Wikipedia page.
>
> Teaching Wikipedia literacy is a subclass of web literacy.  Just
> as  a teacher of information literacy gives students a whole slew
> of shortcuts and tips ("look for the author's name on the
> website"; "look for .gov or .edu") which are far from perfect but
> provide a starting point, we could also provide tips on how to
> check the likely authority of a Wikipedia page. Footnotes and
> cited sources; good information on the discussion page; is it one
> of the fields in which Wikipedia is strong.
>
> -Deborah
>   

-- 
Jonathan Rochkind
Sr. Programmer/Analyst
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886 
rochkind (at) jhu.edu