The always-effervescent Lisa Barone over at Bruce Clay apparently has had a change of heart regading everyone’s favorite online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. In a recent blog post, she details how she’s come to see the wiki-light, by learning to regard the site as a ‘resource instead of a definitive answer’.
I don’t want to sound like that one person you know who never figured out the end of the Sixth Sense, but I don’t get it. It’s easy to agree with Lisa’s assessment that Wikipedia, when seen as little more than a launching pad for research, is an effective site. The problem is, as a reference, shouldn’t Wikipedia count for more?
Lisa might know well enough to take Wikipedia with nothing more than a grain of salt, but can we say the same of the average web user? With an assist from Google, Wikipedia seems to be passing itself off as more (or at least not fighting the misconception) that the site’s an authority on well, everything.
Making matters worse is how the site combines the whims of the web public at large and the highly fluid nature of the web to create a ‘truth du jour’ that results in the Transformer Megatron getting five times as much coverage as the pair that discovered DNA. That seems a bit sketchy if you ask me.
We do tell people “it’s not reliable as such, it’s good and useful, it’s a live working draft, it’s just written by people” and so on … all of which I would have thought reasonably obvious. But anyway.
It seems the problem you’re outlining is people believing everything they read on the Internet. Unfortunately, Wikipedia is not yet able to cure that level of stupidity. We’re working on it, though.
To me Wikipedia is the definitely location on the web for a topic. If I’m going to link to something for a definition I’ll typically link to Wikipedia because they’ve created (in my mind) a canonical URL for the associated topic.
As for Wikipedia being the “truth du jour” I would ask at the risk of getting too philisophical “What exactly *is* the truth?” The past decade of political strife in the USA has proven to me that “truth” is spun and perceptions of truth are people want it to be. In that environment, how can you really define truth?
Said another way, while Wikipedia might not have the 100% correct truth, I would challenge you to find another source that is unbiased and more accurate. If they are the best, is it fair to take them to task for not being perfect?