In recent years, Wikipedia has become such a staple in the life of an everyday computer user. I myself consult it frequently on just about every topic I need to get some quick information on. It's a perfect place to start research due it's broad coverage of most topics as well as its citations section where scholarly articles are often listed as references. It's popularity keeps it so high in search return priority that almost no matter what query you type into google (or any search engine for that matter), a Wiki page will more than likely show up in the results. It was only a matter of time before someone decided to write a book about the history of this influential display of web 2.0ism.
The World and Wikipedia, by Andrew Dalby, explains the driving force as to how and why Wikipedia came to exist. Dalby traces its roots all the way back to ancient times and relates the formation of Wikis to how early encyclopedias were developed and a distributed. In the first half of the book, other than the history of the encyclopedia, Dalby focuses on two main points which are summed up with the chapter titles "Why 'They' Hate It" and "Why You Use It". 'It' obviously referring to Wikipedia while the terms 'they' and 'you' remain pretty ambiguous.
So who are 'they' and why do they hate Wikipedia? Well, according to this book and some of my own knowledge on the topic, they are authors and editors of traditional encyclopedias, scholarly journals, or other academic referential resources. They hate Wikipedia because it can be, and most often is, edited by your everyday Internet user. According to them, this leaves a much higher margin for error due to people not thoroughly researching topics or just haphazardly posting hearsay on the site. This claim has led to the complete dismissal of Wikipedia as a scholarly reference even though recent statistics have shown that Wikipedia's error rate of about 3.86 errors per page is not far off from the Encyclopedia Britannica's which is roughly 2.92 errors per page (see Study: Wikipedia as accurate as Britannica).
Other criticisms of the site include the level of coherence to which the articles are written. Dalby makes a bold move and references a few Nicholas Carr statements about the idea that Wikipedia articles are nothing more than a "hodgepodge of dubious factoids." In my opinion, the presentation style of Wikipedia articles as critiqued by Carr and Dalby actually make it very easy to extract information from the site. Blurbs that are short and to the point give the ability to get a whole lot of information from simply browsing the article. This is nice if you are trying to get a quick overview of the topic or if you have many topics that need to be addressed. Whether or not a person finds the information to be relevant is subjective. They, like anyone else, have the power to update the site with clearer information if they so choose.
If these smart people frown upon Wikipedia then why do we use it?
There are actually quite a few reasons why we use Wikipedia. The first one, that has been mentioned periodically in this entry one way or another, is its convenience. It has a very easy to read layout, with loads of facts on some less traditional topics that you just wont find in a regular encyclopedia. The fact that user's can contribute to the page is also a huge reason why its so popular. People like to have presence, especially on the web. Wikipedia articles are easy to create/update and make regular people feel like pseudo-historians. Which apparently does wonders for someones well-being. I knew a few people that contribute to Wikipedia semi-regularly and have described this strange feeling of importance when they see their information available for other to learn from.
Google actually has a lot to do with the success of Wikipedia also. Google has been putting Wiki sites in their database since 2001 and making them available for searchers to access. Two things necessary to be popular on the Internet are accessibility and findability. Google provided both to the budding reference site. So yeah, we use Wikipedia because its a interesting site, but more than that we use Wikipedia because we've been force fed it with every search request for quite some time now.
Wikipedia really upped the ante in 2007 when it decided to make it a point to have all aspects of the site monitored and fact checked by a hired staff. This left the site looking really sharp and even more legitimate, which started to become a huge issue in schools. Students were using Wikipedia because it was a lot easier than reading books and displayed information similar to the type they would get from something like a sparknotes book (i.e. it was usually much easier to understand). Teachers would notice student responses that seemed slightly off and found that they were all using Wiki entries as their source. Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, was quoted in an interview with Businessweek saying "No, I don't think people should cite it [Wikipedia]... People shouldn't be citing encyclopedias in the first place. Wikipedia and other encyclopedias should be solid enough to give good, solid background information to inform your studies for a deeper level." (for the full interview see Wikipedia: A Work in Progress) I think this is a point that should be mentioned to middle school and high school students. Wikipedia shouldn't be the forbidden fruit of the reference world, it just needs to be used in the right context and taken with a grain of salt.
Just for fun: Check out some of the "Bad Jokes and other Deleted Nonsense" wiki pages
Still more best of: BJAODN
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