[Web4lib] Problems with Wikipedia

[Karen Coyle]

To do that, we'd have to be able to quantitatively define "all 
information." I think that's an impossibility. We could compare one 
information source to another, but "all information" is not a finite set 
because it changes every moment.

And I'm not sure that quantitative measuring really gets us anywhere. I 
agree with other posters here that what we need, and what we need to 
attempt to convey to users, is a measure (so to speak) of critical 
thinking. If I want to know what traditional historians say about a 
person or an event, I go to sources where they provide their views. If I 
want information on a recent programming language or a colorful 
character in the information technology space, I go to Wikipedia. Very 
instructive is to look at the Wikipedias in other languages to see how 
different they are from each other. If I want information on a Pope, 
believe me, the Wikipedia in Italian is THE place to go. If I want 
information on a French author, then fr.wikipedia.org is it. (Just 
compare any author in fr. and en.) As a matter of fact, now that I think 
about it, it's a bit of a shame that Wikipedias divide by language, 
because I'd love for there to be a Canadian Wikipedia, a Scottish 
Wikipedia, and an Irish and Welsh Wikipedia that I could read ;-). Maybe 
if we would consider the term "Wikipedia" to be all of these we could 
develop a more relativistic view of what it means as an information source.

kc

Lars Aronsson wrote:
> Karen Coyle wrote:
>
>   
>> This is true of the Web in general, not just Wikipedia. The Web is far from
>> "all information"
>>     
>
> Very much so.  But the question was *how* far.  As information 
> specialists, we should have a method to *measure* that distance.
>
>
>   

-- 
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Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
kcoyle at kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
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