I love Wikipedia.
Discounting folks with a vested interest in badmouthing Wikipedia, the site/organization/system gets bad press because people try to make it something it’s not. Wikipedia is not tablets handed down from God (though it’s a lot more transparent in its declarations). It’s not even the Encyclopedia Britannica (though it has a lot more content).
Wikipedia is a bunch of people presenting information they are interested in or know about in an organized, hyperlinked fashion. It’s the Web writ small.
As a volunteer effort, and one that’s open to pretty much anyone who wants to throw stuff out there, Wikipedia does face problems that need to be borne in mind.
- Contributors make mistakes.
- Contributors have agendas that explicitly or implicitly color what they present as fact.
- Contributors are sometimes obnoxious, vandalistic, libelous, or simply don’t take the effort seriously.
You could, of course, level the same charge against any form of media — from the Web as a whole to the New York Times or Wall Street Journal. They have editorial boards (which can be biased), and they have subscribers and customers and advertisers (which can make them biased, too), but they also have resources to get at info and usually encourage better writing style.
Wikipedia isn’t going to make Time Magazine obsolete — but Time is never going to be able to do what Wikipedia does. There are a zillion Wikipedia entries out there, on all shapes and sizes of stuff, and a lot of them have great information collected on them. And, like all web (or, again, media) sources, the important thing to do is trust but verify:
- If a source is cited on a Wikipedia page (which most entries are, or else end up with a [citation needed] tag), follow up on that source. That source might, in turn, also be biased, or even misread, but it might also confirm what’s being said. While the mainstream media isn’t free of problems (as noted), I do feel better relying on something in Wikipedia if it has, in fact, been in a major media source.
- If the subject matter is controversial, bear that in mind (as you should in in any media — but, perhaps, more so here). Use your own critical judgment. The more controversial a subject, the more likely that an entry is going to be slanted one way or the other (or, if you have multiple people editing an entry, in more than one way).
- If something just seems … off … it may well be.
I wouldn’t write a term paper based solely on Wikipedia entries — but I might use it as a starting point for a term paper, looking up the sources cited, and I might use it as background to understand a couple of things I run across in a text. I certainly feel I can rely upon it to give decent factual information in areas where there’s no obvious axe to grind (What happened in 1922 worldwide? When was Queen Victoria born? Who was Saint Swithin? What’s TCP/IP? What are Kim Possible’s twin brothers’ names?). As such, it’s often easier and more enriching to take a least a first pass at Wikipedia for my questions, not necessarily counting on it as the final answer.
And, as such, I love Wikipedia.