[Web4lib] Wikipedia

[phoebe ayers]

Janette,
Thanks for your question -- here's a long answer :)

I think, as an academic librarian and long-time Wikipedia community
member, that Wikipedia is one of the most important projects that has
ever been developed online, and understanding precisely how Wikipedia
works, and contributing to the site -- making entries better -- should
be part of the job description for every single librarian. I think
this for the following reasons:

* Wikipedia -- all 270 language versions of Wikipedia together --
represents perhaps the most multilingual, most international reference
work ever put together. The Wikipedia edition in many smaller
languages is sometimes the first reference project, and certainly the
first online reference project, in that particular language. And the
English-language edition, along with the other large languages, is
read by people from all over the world -- improve an article in
English and it will be read by students from California to Nigeria.

* Wikipedia's community constitutes tens of thousands of dedicated
volunteers from all over the world, who believe in what they're doing;
the site as a whole represents one of the most remarkable group
efforts ever -- without management, coercion, or compensation -- to
produce something. It is one of the most erudite, passionate, quirky,
argumentative, copyright-conscious and interesting groups of people I
have ever had the pleasure to be a part of.

* Your students, patrons, faculty members and administrators are using
Wikipedia, whether they admit it or not, and sometimes probably
without even realizing it. Last month, Wikimedia Foundation sites got
365 million unique visitors worldwide, 82M from North America [data
from Comscore]. The only sites that get more traffic are Facebook,
MSN, Yahoo and Google. Wikimedia is the only non-profit top-ten
website, and the highest ranked reference and information site by
many, many orders of magnitude. People use it. I sit at my reference
desk at a Research 1 institution, surrounded by a very expensive and
comprehensive science print reference collection, and watch the
students on the public computers using Wikipedia to do their homework.

* And they use it because it's actually generally OK, and getting
better. (Do you have a *better* instantly available, free ready
reference source about anything from Star Trek to chemical compounds
at hand, right now?) The main thing to realize about Wikipedia is it's
uneven: each article has to be judged on its own merits, because
different articles have had different levels of work and review put
into them. Judging the whole thing as "bad" or "good" is inaccurate
and meaningless; there are great articles and terrible articles. It's
a work in progress.

* And it's not going away. It's free content, which means free as in
cost and free as in a free license -- anyone, including commercial
publishers, can reuse Wikipedia content as long as they adhere to the
terms of CC-BY. Which means that there is an even greater incentive to
make sure Wikipedia content is up to grade.

And who better than librarians to add reliable sources to articles, to
make sure claims are well sourced, to add further reading sections, to
fix grammar and slowly help build the world's encyclopedia? Those
sources in Wikipedia articles that everyone is advocating using don't
appear by magic -- people add them, one by one, and trust me -- in my
experience the folks who research articles generally are not as
skilled at this task as librarians are. And it matters: anything you
do in Wikipedia will be seen by far, far more people and affect many
more people's information seeking than just about anything else you
can do as a professional.

-- Phoebe Ayers, MLIS & author of "How Wikipedia Works"



On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 7:11 PM, janette treanor
<janettetreanor at gmail.com> wrote:
> Morning All,
>
> I am wondering what you think of Wikipedia? I would appreciate hearing your
> opinion.
>
> kind regards
> janette
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