Wikipedia. That word alone may stir up various thoughts. During my years as a public school teacher who insisted on assigning research, I spoke negatively about Wikipedia. After all, this service allows readers to edit and even submit encyclopedia entries. If you want, you could visit Wikipedia right now and alter written history to state that Brutus stabbed Abraham Lincoln in 1957, when Lincoln exclaimed, "Golly! Ain't that a sumbitch!" I wouldn't recommend it.
Recently my opinion has begun to change, but only in recognizing the limitations of a service such as Wikipedia. (Here comes the quoting.) In his book The Long Tail, Chris Anderson writes extensively about the joining of the professional and amateur worlds, stating that this marriage is beneficial to the consumer and society as a whole. About Wikipedia, Anderson writes, "Much is made of the fact that Wikipedia's entries are 'non-authoritative,' which is a way of saying they're not invariably accurate...Unlike [Encyclopedia] Britannica, where each entry is scrubbed, checked, and labored over by responsible professionals, each Wikipedia entry simply arrives, conjured from the vacuum by the miracle of the 'Edit This Page' button" (67). As with the Lincoln assassination example above.
Anderson goes on to discuss "probabilistic statistics," the idea of likelihood rather than certainty. He says that Wikipedia, on a large scale, is successful, even mentioning that "...[A] 2005 study by Nature, the scientific journal, reported that in forty-two entries on science topics there were an average of four errors per entry in Wikipedia and three in Britannica" (69).
The benefit of Wikipedia, Anderson continues, is that it is like a living organism in that it continues to grow, change, and shift with its users. The converse is that Britannica is static, at least until the next edition is ready for print. In a section entitled "The Power of Peer Production," Anderson notes, "One study by IBM found that the mean repair time for damage in high-profile Wikipedia entries such as 'Islam' is less than four minutes" (70).
I have changed, though not overhauled, my opinion about Wikipedia. I can, and do, use it, but not as the final word on any given subject...because I'm fairly sure Lincoln wasn't stabbed.
