Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a wonderful source of information. The world at large has come together to contribute articles on a million topics. It is like a huge collaborative encyclopedia, but it contains articles that are obscure, cultural, and entertaining. Unlike Britannica, Wikipedia has no limit on what can be posted to it. There may be an entry on the space shuttle mission that launched 30 minutes ago or one on Hispanic heroes of television. The Internet has given us some marvelous research and reading tools – Wikipedia and Google are two of the most popular. For the first time information on every imaginable topic can be found in a few moments.

But, is Wikipedia a reliable research source? Currently, the academic answer is “no”. Since there is no formal and controlled process for limiting what is posted, the academic world does not feel that it is reliable. I have seen this unreliability myself. In one of Wikipedia’s daily-featured articles on the Cat’s Eye Nebula, some contributor edited the content (perfectly normal) and replaced astronomic facts for profane sentences of a sexual nature. I was surprised to find the graffiti, and captured a screenshot of it. However, I also continued to monitor the page to see how long the article would remain corrupted. Within 9 minutes someone in the world spotted the corruption and fixed it. Clearly, there is an editorial process at work on Wikipedia. It is not a formal board of editors. Instead the editors who must approve an article are the entire world. Potentially, any articles posted will be edited and approved by 10,000 people. Possibly Wikipedia articles are subject to more critical review that anything in a journal or newspaper.

However, this informal editing process does not guarantee the quality of all million articles in Wikipedia. Some topics may have many, highly qualified people editing them, while others have few interested contributors and even fewer who are well qualified. In addition, there is no way to identify the qualifications of these contributors. Wiki does keep track of which subscribers have edited an article and when, but there is no info on who they are.

Wikipedia is like USA Today and the television news shows. It will become the primary source of information for most of the world. It has already far surpassed Britannica as the leading reference source in the world. But, the nature of its content generation will prevent it from being a major academic source … in its current form. Wiki has launched a number of specialized services. One of these could be an academic research site where the contributors register their CV’s and their contributions are labeled. This could easily evolve into an authoritative source.