So here’s Steven’s take on the whole Wikipedia as a source issue:
I’ve had many conversations with colleagues about using Wikipedia as an online resource. Many say that we shouldn’t trust it. My usual replay is that we shouldn’t trust anything both online and off. That includes those ready-reference materials that sit right at the reference desk that we turn to to answer a basic query (are there any basic queries anymore?) We should treat Wikipedia like we treat anything online. With skepticism.
Does anyone know of a Wikipedia article that has been deconstructed for accuracy?
Robert McHenry, Former Editor in Chief, the Encyclopædia Britannica wrote this in part on the Alexander Hamilton article. He noted that there is ongoing scholarly disagreement about the date of Hamilton’s birth, but that this was not reflected in the Wikipedia article. Of course, by the time I got over there to check, the controversy was duly noted…
The nature of wikipedia is self-correcting. The problem is, you never can know for certain whether an error has in fact been corrected at the time you look at it.
btw – I like the new template. Much easier on the eyes. The red one reminded me a tad too much of an old King Crimson cover… ;-^
Uh… all of them. Isn’t that the whole point?
That’s a little rough, even for you, Tom. ;0)
Wikidepia entries have all been edited, yeah. But not everyone who goes in to add information to an entry proofs everything that’s already there. My point is that if someone took a Wikipedia entry and fact checked it and combed it for bias, not necessarily just added/deleted info they knew…
Snark aside, if I didn’t think that close fact-checking already happened on a regular basis, I wouldn’t use Wikipedia.
You know, I hate it when you make sense, Tom.
I started a response to this here, but I got carried away. So I turned it into a blog entry: The truth is out there: trust no-one
A summary of my blog might be, “I’m becoming more comfortable with the Wikipedia concept, but still have doubts about its reliability”. Now why couldn’t I have just said that in the first place without getting carried away? I need to learn to write shorter blog entries. 🙂
David