I’ve been sitting on a few stories about Wikipedia and just haven’t had the opportunity to say much about them.
First, is this story from a newspaper in Charleston, Illinois. It basically says that some people are actually using Wikipedia as a teaching instrument. Oh my gosh! How horrible! Oh wait, that’s sarcasm. Yes, of course people should be using it as a teaching tool and “springboard” to further research. It’s the people who are totally against it that are, in my opinion, doing students a disservice. Instead of being proactively teaching students critical thinking with a tool with which they’re familiar, some tell students no. To me, that goes against what information literacy is all about. Not to mention that libraries and librarians are always saying “free access” and “non-discriminatory” access to information. Let students make up tehir minds on what is useful and what is not. But, give them the tools to make good use of that information.
This article in the New York Times is about editing Sarah Palin’s Wikipedia article before she was announced as the Republican nominee for VP. It was being edited by someone with the name “YoungTrigg” an obvious reference to Palin’s youngest son Trig. As most people probably already know, Wikipedia is often the default place for people to find out more about a person online. They could go to that politician’s website, but Wikipedia comes up in the top 10 quite often. Anyway, there was cause for concern among some that YoungTrigg was adding information that was biased. The article astutely pointed out that,
While ethically suspect, the idea that a politician would try to shape her Wikipedia article shouldn’t come as a surprise. In modern politics, where the struggle is to “define” yourself before your opponent “defines” you, Wikipedia has become an important part of political strategy.
Too true. It just goes to show you how important a source of information Wikipedia has become for today’s public officials and those who want to know more about them.
The third is a book review of Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet by Ian McNeely and Lisa Wolverton. The reviewer, Laura Miller, does a good job describing the book and how we got from ancient times to the present day. As she titles the article, it describes the “Road to Wikipedia.” These few sentences struck me:
The missing piece is the mechanism by which we’ll decide the difference between information and knowledge in the future. The closest McNeely and Wolverton come to offering a definition of knowledge is “everything deemed worth knowing,” which at first seems a bit tautological. But that, really, is the crux of the matter. Is every minute detail of every permutation of Japanese pop culture worth knowing? To judge by some Wikipedia entries it is. The page for, say, the solemn but essentially silly manga “Death Note” is 10 times longer than, say, the entry for Anthony Trollope’s novel “Framley Parsonage.”
While I think that Miller is right in questioning whether having an article on Death Note that is 10 times longer than Trollope’s novel Framley Parsonage, what I don’t agree with is whether she is qualified to make that distinction. It’s probably my Web 2.0 cheerleading poking through but perhaps in the future Death Note will be just as important of a literary document as Trollope’s novel. To be honest, I’ve never heard of either, so I can’t really judge either. But, the larger point that I’m trying to make is that just because it isn’t worth knowing now doesn’t mean that it won’t be useful later. And, on top of that, who’s to say that if Wikipedia hadn’t been around when Trollope wrote Framely Parsonage that it wouldn’t be just as long if not longer than Death Note is right now. One of the biggest problems with the dichotomy she made is that they’re from a different era. And, I would venture a guess that more people who are likely to contribute to Wikipedia are reading Death Note than Framley Parsonage.
But, before I get ahead of myself and keep cheerleading for Wikipedia and Web 2.0 stuff, it is also worth quoting the last paragraph of the review.
Without a doubt, we’ve entered an era when the official truth is easier to challenge than ever before, but do we really want to live in a world without any established truths at all, or where every fact must be democratically elected by a horde of individuals whose judgment may not be informed or trustworthy? Do we want to let the cranks who care enough to make the biggest stink on a subject be the ones to have the final word on it? On the other hand, can we afford to write off all of them as cranks, knowing that every so often a crank turns out to be a prophet? Somehow, we’ll have to sort all this out.
I couldn’t have said it better myeslf. We’re really in the nascent stages of this Web 2.0 thing so it’s not like we have to figure it all out right now. Give us some time and we’ll all come to terms with it. It just takes time. That’s why librarians are pushing things like information literacy. We’ve seen big changes in how people interact with information and are trying to start from scratch in teaching students how to effectively and efficiently use and manage it.
The funny thing about Wikipedia is that people in the justice department realized that they shouldn’t use it to determine whether someone should be granted asylum in the US. Huh, I could have told you that!
Using the Wikipedia page as evidence, the government convinced an immigration judge that the document [an Ethiopian travel document] did not prove her identity, calling it a one-way travel document based on information provided by the applicant.
Wow, it just goes to show you how much work we have to do to educate people on the proper use of all information resources, including Wikipedia.
Finally, a new medical wiki, Medpedia, is going to be starting soon. It’s like Wikipedia except that it’s going to require you to have an MD or PhD in a “biomedical field” to contribute. According to the Chronicle, the new encyclopedia is “backed by medical institutions like Harvard Medical School, Stanford School of Medicine, the University of California at Berkeley School of Public Health, and the University of Michigan Medical School, as well as the National Institutes of Health, the American College of Physicians, and several other organizations.” Pretty good, I think. I’ll have to wait and see how useful it is and whether it takes off. The aim is to be the “most complete and up-to-date health site online.” That’s a pretty lofty goal and one that I think will be hard to accomplish. We’ve already got sites like medlineplus.gov that I think are pretty good. But, one of the nice things about this particular wiki is that it will have “an accessible version for the lay public and a more technical account for health professionals and other knowledgeable readers.” That’s worth noting because there isn’t such a thing for Wikipedia. And, because we know medical knowledge is very specialized, I can only imagine how quickly this site would go down in flames if it were only for doctors and medical praticioners.
