Steve Bennett wrote:
On 21/04/06, Guettarda guettarda@gmail.com wrote:
Wow. That's disturbing. There are times when the influence of Wikipedia makes me distinctly uncomfortable...if I make a mistake in what I write, if I screw something up, I have changed "knowledge". Yet again, I wish that the world understood that Wikipedia is a beta.
I think of Wikipedia more like "my first encyclopaedia" than "beta" as such. Sometimes beta software is pretty good. You can use beta software to run your business. I don't think any serious professional or academic would be trusting their reputation on "my first encyclopaedia".
I know plenty of academics who use Wikipedia on a regular basis to do real work (some of them due to my evangelizing), and am one myself.
As with any source, a grain of salt is always necessary, and if the information is particularly important it should be verified from multiple sources. But in general Wikipedia articles in areas I'm interested in (the sciences, math, and computer science) are about as accurate as traditional encyclopedia articles (_Science_'s Wikipedia versus Britannica survey agrees). Of course, coverage of science in traditional encyclopedias is far from perfect, so improvement is always possible and to be desired. Some of that can already be done on the reader's end---After using it for a bit you get a feel for how much to trust a particular article, based on how frequently edited it is, how controversial the topic is, and whether it "sounds right" (many biased articles *sound* like they're pushing a point of view).
As a general reference, I think it's at least beta, though. I use it as part of serious academic work, and I know others who do as well. We don't *cite* it, or rely exclusively on it, but we don't do that with textbooks or Britannica, either. There are certainly huge gaping holes in coverage, and some pretty bad articles, but in general it's useful as a reference, and I usually turn first to Wikipedia when I want to look something up.
-Mark