Allen,

Wikipedia both troubles and scares me.

I think we have always been a nation of "trusters," but when we trust our information to group thinking, team writing and collective editing, minus bylines and credentials, receiving misinformation becomes the likely result. And once misinformation begins to spread, we have a wildfire of ignorance growing.

Of course, credentials don't prevent misinformation. But when one knows the source, we can better decide what is true and what isn't. And when writers and researchers are held accountable for their work, they usually struggle diligently to get it right.

So very much agree with Lewis and Allen here! Wikipedia is full of interesting tidbits of information, but before taking it as gospel truth, researchers need to confirm things. I think it would be beneficial for Wikipedia to require sources to be documented. Maybe we'll get there one day....

Not at all…

Wikipedia is a growing phenomenon that like it or not, is here to stay. It’s placement as a top ranked search result attests to its growing influence. We should not ignore this astounding growth, nor should we prohibit people from using it (like students). Instead we should look at Wikipedia as a starting point in the research that we conduct. It provides a fast, albeit partially truthful response to our query, and we should use that response as the beginning of the research process.

Instead of teaching students that we can’t use it we should be teaching them how to use it to find better and more credible sources.

If you are troubled by Wikipedia, try "Wikiasari," the Wiki-based search engine being launched by Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales:

http://search.wikia.com/wiki/Search_Wikia

Wikipedia is a great place to "begin" research. It should be clearly stated as a source in any serious study. At that point the reader can determine whether to take it as gospel. I'm guessing peer reviews would cast a skeptical eye on it.

And I agree with Steven - its here to stay. Thanks for the link, Ann -

Hi All,
I have no problem with Wikipedia as a place to begin research, but I hope that users realize it is not an authority on any topic but simply a large combination of a number of perspectives. This would be similar to any textbook on a subject, providing definitions, etc. Again, as I mentioned, the trend in universities (as far as my anecdotal evidence indicates) is that professors are beginning to say that students cannot use Wikipedia as the main reference (I, for one, noticed that my mba students often don't go beyond Wikipedia for gathering information...a very sorry situation). However, my broader concern is that Wikipedia, by being consistently placed in the top 10 results in Google, will "crowd out" other sites that may have a lot more useful and interesting things to say on any topic.

In short, no.

I think we, as a culture, have been in a bubble of trusting for the past 100 years or so, in which we were purely consumers of content (music, plays, books, and so forth).

Before that time, people were forced to consider the source of the information to judge its accuracy. Of course we should have been doing this for the past hundred years, but the evening news is just too easy. We've gotten lazy.

Now we have Wikipedia, YouTube, Amazon.com product ratings, MySpace, self-publishing, and myriad other phenomena enabled largely by the content distribution and communications aspects of the Internet. What these provide is a globalization of the town. Now rumors can run amok (else snopes.com would be irrelevant), cults more easily rise, and so forth. This is definitely a problem.

On the other hand, any educated person "soon" (I'm self-educating) will develop an entire list of heuristics and algorithms to evaluate data. How do you know which Digg comments to ignore? To evaluate? Do you buy that product on Amazon with most people happy and a few people with major issues? (answer: get the service plan)

So ... Wikipedia is a way to get the general consensus for some topic of research. Looking at the history tells you more about how stable the consensus is. It gives you the proper terminology to better state your research to "reputable" sources (though the error rate is roughly comparable).

If you're not convinced about the "wisdom of crowds", perhaps this article will convince you:

Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/50902

For those of you not familiar with The Onion, this article is a spoof. ;-)

actually, the more I think about this, Wikipedia should be considered a blog by google and placed in it's own search category and therefore not interfere with the search results of other sites.

The comment from Steven Lukac above hits the bullseye...

It's especially concerning when you consider the relatively few individuals who contribute multiple entries to the site. Readers are at the relative mercy of their opinions and biases.

Good point, Jeremy. So now, people are learning important topics from just a few people who are likely not expert in the areas (or it's difficult to know how expert they really are). Here is a case in point. In marketing, the Wiki authors just quote other people about the myriad ways to segment a market, while academics who have studied this topic in depth know that most bases (like geographic, demographic, etc) don't work.

What an interesting way to get people interested in reading! Book trailers are like movie trailers, but for books! You can find them all over the internet now, but here is a site that's featuring them on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/booktrailers