I love Wikipedia, an open encyclopedia that is built from the ground up by volunteers. Anyone can create an entry, and anyone can edit any entry (and, in turn, have their revised entry edited by someone else). Wikipedia is an example of a type of collaborative software called wiki. Or to define it somewhat recursively, see the Wikipedia discussion of wiki(s). Wikipedia even defines itself. Apparently, an anonymous librarian expressed concern that the open nature of Wikipedia made it unreliable, and a Syracuse newspaper columnist used the email as an excuse to attack Wikipedia. And kept attacking Wikipedia defenders via email.
So it was heartening to see some objective support of the Wikipedia model, wherein Alex Halavais intentionally submitted 13 erroneous changes to Wikipedia pages, all of which were caught and corrected within a couple of hours. How can it be so efficient? It’s easy to track changes to Wikipedia, which publishes a “Recent Changes” page (at the time I looked, the most recent change was to the page for Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf). For a more real-world example, see the Wikipedia entry history for Jew, which is currently locked from editing due to ongoing battles with Holocaust revisionists. I find Wikipedia to be in an invaluable resource, for everything from the population of Vermont to famous Bubbas in history to Allied deceptions leading up to D-Day. Most internet information repositories can’t cover all three.
Related information:
Joi Ito on Wikipedia
Columnist Dan Gillmor says that Wikipedia is “an example of how the grass roots in today’s interconnected world can do extraordinary things.”
Steve Yelvington says Wikipedia is “user-generated content at its finest>”
Recent changes to Wikipedia (RSS feed is here)
November 17th, 2004 at 6:18 pm
sorry… was doing a search for articles on the unreliability of wikipedia and came across your blog after i’d actually read the article you point to from the syracuse post-standard.
i think the point the librarian was trying to make was that MOST users of ANY resource on the internet are unable to determine if the information is authoritative and correct (and may not even care or understand what this really means). many users are still in the dark about the internet and think that, virtually, everything they access is good information. wikipedia is especially confusing because many users think it is an online version of, say, the encyclopedia britannica eventhough they could determine that this is not the case by reading the disclaimer. but who am i kidding, who reads the disclaimers?