On 25/05/07, Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com wrote:
The "Wikipedia problem" - well, talk to half a dozen librarians or teachers, you'll know exactly what they'd say if you asked what the "Wikipedia problem" is. It's ubitquitous, it's pervasive, it's not very good compared to a lot of other stuff out there. It's the same problem *every other person* who worries about Wikipedia is concerned with - that peoples behaviour online is to google for something, take the first result uncritically; if it's something researchable, that first result is probably served up by us; they'll take it and read it and never think to check it.
Anyone who is willing to take information uncritically off the Internet, without doing basic cross-checks as to its reliability and provenance, will have a problem. That's true whether Wikipedia exists or not. Wikipedia (or for that matter, any encyclopedia) makes a great starting point for research, but a very poor finishing point for it.
"Well, people should have more clue" is the same thing *they're* saying, when you get down to it. It's true, but repeating it doesn't refute the problem :-)
Wikipedia provides a) a central point for broadly reliable but individually dubious articles; and b) a nice clean-looking respectable veneer. Never underestimate a good presentation.
I'm not saying this is a new problem, or that we're somehow specifically to blame for it. But it is fair to say that we are a *very* major source for all thosde "grab the first page that comes up" searches on topics... we look and feel reliable even when the content is tripe.
These people are professionals; they know all this. Consider what these people do for their day jobs: they invest staggering amounts of money and effort in obtaining and providing incredibly high-quality online resources, which people then ignore, go straight to Google, and wind up on Wikipedia. Which, for all our merits, is so not in the same league as these works for scholarly topics. "The Wikipedia problem" is not that we exist, or that we get used, but that the Internet's search system has developed in such a way as to make us much, much more prominent than we ought to be by any rational measures.
The average electronic resources librarian would give an arm and a leg for a system which intelligently took account of locally available resources and made it trivially easy - and indeed encouraging - to use complex searching. (And they have one - themselves - but honest-to-god reference queries are a dying breed).
This problem is really "The problem which is heavily manifested in relation to Wikipedia", not "the problem with Wikipedia and only Wikipedia". But it's handy shorthand - and everyone nods and says "yeah, I know, we have it too", and so it gets used.