[Web4lib] Problems with Wikipedia

[Karen Coyle]

Lars Aronsson wrote:
>   
> But nobody is going back, day by day, through the 1950s to add 
> background information on news stories day by day.  Perhaps this 
> is what needs to be done?  Can we estimate what we're missing?
>
>
>   
This is true of the Web in general, not just Wikipedia. The Web is far 
from "all information" -- and it isn't a balanced view of information 
about the world, either. It's the corpus of what a small portion of the 
world population that happens to have access to the network has chosen 
to make available. (Some of us have been making this point since the 
early days of Gopher.) It's heavily weighted toward geek topics (do a 
google search for "python" -- no snakes) and the youth culture of the 
Western world (Britney Spears et al). It's also possibly more commercial 
than any knowledge base has ever been in the past. Unlike a more 
classical view of knowledge, one day's news article can change the 
entire measure of importance of a piece of information for about 24 
hours. It's fluid, unruly, and idiosyncratic.

So I guess the upshot is that it's useless comparing Wikipedia to the 
Encyclopaedia Brittanica -- they aren't the same thing. Wikipedia really 
is a new beast. And like it or not, the "old beast" is about to go 
bankrupt since it has lost its customer base.

kc

-- 
-----------------------------------
Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
kcoyle at kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
ph.: 510-540-7596
fx.: 510-848-3913
mo.: 510-435-8234
------------------------------------