Steve Bennett wrote:
On 21/04/06, Guettarda <guettarda(a)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