People today are also obsessed, rightly, with proper citation of thought. In the brave new world of the internet, we are all obliged to prove our sources - especially in a no-name blog such as this. Linking makes this easy, but we must ask exactly how accurate these supposed facts are. Further, we should probably question the idea of "facts" itself because it's too black and white to be useful - but that's for another post.
I get into a conversation about once a month about Wikipedia's accuracy compared to standard encyclopedias. I will then retort that a study showed Wikipedia to be bigger (~3.5M vs. ~250K articles) and about as good as Britannica. They'll often respond that this just can't be true because it can be changed by anyone and it changes all the time.
On the surface both points are certainly valid, however we first need to look at the purpose of encyclopedias to see what the real effects of this are. This overarching purpose is of course to provide a cursory primer of a topic that can be used by the general public - which the Citing Wikipedia article agrees with. You don't read Britannica to learn how to farm - you do it to learn what farming is. For this broad case of uses, there is no equal to Wikipedia.
Books like Wikinomics and The Wisdom of Crowds make a great case for community created / managed knowledge. That knowledge can be accumulated faster, cover a broader area, and update faster using such a system - impossible with any other system. What they often don't talk about is the very real problem of changing citation sources. You can't quote Wikipedia articles directly (as we're all guilty of) - you really need to define it in terms of which article you're referring to. This is why I'm sort of thinking that to encourage good citations, we should link to the past edits page of the page.
Here's an http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Citation&oldid=357673084.
There are a few issues though. Firstly, the URL above doesn't tell you much, unlike the very clean http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation. Also, there may be issues with these pages getting hit more often because they're not really intended to be used this way. I'd like to see a URL like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation/2010/04/24 or similar that'd be an easy shorthand citation for website and papers - unlike the current blah MLA one:
"Citation." Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 22 April 2010. Web. 24 April 2010. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation>
Really, any non-Luddite knows that Wikipedia and such projects are hugely beneficial and here to stay after Brittanica is bankrupt and recycled. I'd just like to see features like this that make the site citeable.
Great post, Nick. I get into conversations about Wikipedia at roughly the same frequency. What seems to freak people out is the "anyone can edit" principle, which turns out to be much less of a problem when you think about it, and is actually a benefit. Two reasons for this:
1. Who's writing Brittanica? Educated people. Who's editing Wikipedia? Educated people + idiots, who are caught pretty fast, especially on popular articles.
2. More importantly, there's a dialectic at play. If we assume that the best way of highlighting bias is to receive input from different POVs, what could be better than letting everyone contribute? Popular articles will (presumably) be refined more over time as they are edited by people with different perspectives. This kind of knowledge base is the thing that Brittanica could only dream of (e.g., see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Errors_in_the_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica_that_have_been_corrected_in_Wikipedia ).
Posted by: Jon Tennent | April 24, 2010 at 11:57 PM