[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia doesn't get enough respect

[Frederick Noronha]

http://media.www.kstatecollegian.com/media/storage/paper1022/news/2007/03/01/Opinion/Wikipedia.Doesnt.Get.Enough.Respect-2751676.shtml

Wikipedia doesn't get enough respect
By: Jonas Hogg
Issue date: 3/1/07 Section: Opinion

Staff Editorial
Daily Forty-Niner (Cal State-Long Beach)


Among the many under-appreciated and misunderstood resources in our
world, Wikipedia.com ranks high on the list.

It is abused by college students, damned by professors and generally
shunned among the 30-and-older intellectual crowd. Now, according to
an article in the Feb. 21 issue of The New York Times, it has been
banned altogether from a history department at Middlebury College in
Vermont. This move, while shocking, is disappointing for the wrong
reasons - students should never use this Web site as their sole
source.

It is a bit embarrassing that college students would even dare to use
Wikipedia as their only source. For those readers who are not yet up
to speed on the hotly debated Web site, Wikipedia is an online
voluntary encyclopedia that allows readers to submit their own entries
and alter others, usually without restriction. The "voluntary" aspect
is what doesn't jibe with many academics who believe the openness of
Wikipedia can cause incorrect information to seep into the site,
corrupting its validity.

In the case of Middlebury College, the misinformation already has
infiltrated the Web site and, consequentially, students' papers.
According to the article, six students allowed an egregious historical
error into their papers by using Wikipedia for their papers on the
Shimabara Rebellion of 17th-century Japan.

The mistake these students made was not their use of the Web site, but
that they used it as their only source. Wikipedia is a fantastic
resource for primary information and a great starting place for
research.

If users need a brief overview of an issue, they often can find it on
Wikipedia and get a very basic and superficial understanding of a
topic, which can help when doing further research. Some entries,
however, go into greater detail than some Wikipedia skeptics might
give them credit for.

Also, many of Wikipedia's entries are sourced from other, incredibly
useful links to credible Web sites that could be used in essays as
valid sources. Some even copy information from reliable sources and
paste it onto Wikipedia pages. Both Wikipedia's fatal flaw and its
charm are rooted in the same characteristic: the ease with which
readers can change the content of the Web site.


According to a July 31, 2006, article in The New Yorker, Wikipedia's
millionth entry was one sentence on Jordanhill, an obscure train
station in Glasgow, Scotland. According to the article, within 24
hours, the entry was edited more than 400 times by dozens of people
who knew obscure information, like the fact Jordanhill train station
is the "1,029th busiest train station in the United Kingdom" and that
it "no longer has a staffed ticket counter."

One aspect of Wikipedia that might be hard to change is that certain
subjects are not well-known, and people with expertise probably aren't
devoting much time to updating a Wikipedia entry, as was the case with
Middlebury College and 17th century Japanese history.

But, according to the entry on Wikipedia, "An investigation by Nature
(a scholarly journal) compared Wikipedia to the Encyclopaedia
Britannica and suggested a similar level of accuracy."

The only solution to the poor editing and lack of content for which
Wikipedia is criticized is for more people to use it. The more people
use the Web site, the more people may feel compelled to improve its
content and coverage of an issue.
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