Hello everybody,
the German IT news service "Heise" (
www.heise.de) has a short article
on an interview with a German Professor of linguistics talking about
the advantages of Wikipedia.
The German text can be found under:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/59754
I try a short translation here (sorry for the bad English - but I
hope its better than babelfish :-) :
"Following Wolf-Andreas Liebert, linguist at Koblenz, Germany, free
internet encyclopedias like Wikipedia can complement the reporting on
scientific subjects in the media. "Scientific journalism has to
follow commercial restrictions. Wikipedia is still free of that", the
professor said in an interview with the german press agency Deutsche
Presse-Agentur (dpa). [unfortunately no link to the interview itself
- Bernd] Wikipedia could cover subjects that in normal journalism
cannot be sold or said anymore.
"In Wikipedia and other self-organizing systems support the
discussional [?] character of science more strongly." Liebert
declares. Science does not appear to be a uniform system producing
truth, as it often appears in science journalism." In Wikipedia there
are experts and normal people working on texts, that can be up-to-
date and cover different positions. From this point of view it can be
said that Wikipedia can fill up a special gap.
The big disadbantage would be that there is no coherent system of
quality management. "We find articles of a very high level of quality
besides bad articles." The reader has to decide, which articles he
finds trustworthy and good. "In Wikipedia there are different
strategies to deal with the problem", the professor said. He assumes
that the operators of the database would have to take parts out of
the self-organizing process and work with professional authors."
From my point of view, the last passage shows that the professor did
not fully understand what is one of the most important strengths of
Wikipedia. It's the old discussion:
Who guaranties the higher quality of an article by a person named
"dr." or "prof." in other encyclodias? Why should these persons be
more trustable? In fact, the problem of the "inner circle filtering
information" always comes up in these systems.
And: If someone finds articles that do not fullfill scientific
standards - why not correct them immediately? Still people (like
prof. Liebert) think of Wikipedia as any other top-down information
system: "You have to give me information; it has to be correct - and
that is YOUR responsibility!" - "No, it's yours too!" I would like to
answer.
Anyway - I wanted to bring this to your attention because it shows
that Wikipedia is not only subject to scientific analyses already,
but also that - even in the eyes of scientists - it reaches the
levels of "real" scientific encyclopedias and ist not considered only
a "hobby alternative" to "popular" encyclopedias like ... the ones we
know :-)
In fact, I believe, that Wikipedia can soon (2-5 years?) reach higher
quality in the scientific in-depth treatment of subjects than any
other encyclopedia - no one could hinter to publish articles of the
quality of specialised encyclopedias in Wikipedia that may be
interesting only for a small community of scientists dealing with any
subject they like ... And that opens up the way to get more and more
"experts" interested and convince them (hopefully) to co-operate in
Wikipedia: Especially the young students from today will be able to
see and rank the advantages of Wikipedia higher than the traditional
system of "earning fame" in scientific publications. In fact, if
someone does science because s/he is _interested_ in something and
not because of the fame - s/he should see Wikipedia as _the_ tool of
choice to contribute.
greetings
Bernd