Marilyn Roxie

A great infographic on Wikipedia from Open Site (click for larger size!). I had written a post about my reignited love for Wikis a couple of months ago and was contacted about this infographic recently. First of all, the effect Wikipedia has had on encyclopedias, research, and dissemination of information in general is astounding. I do still hold, however, that Wikipedia is best used as a “starting point” for research and not an end-point - the citations and external links listed in many articles are essential to explore to dig further. I would also hope that more users of Wikipedia become familiar with evaluation criteria for content on the web. Based on my experience in some college classes which were concerned with web research, many students are learning these concepts for the first time in such environments and much of this is new information to them.

I also would like to see Wikipedia be a complement to a research institution such as a library, rather than an alternative. Much of the printed word is still not available on-line, or is in the “deep web” hidden from the general searcher (journal articles accessible through paid or free-to-patron library databases, for example). It would make sense to think of the Wikipedia growing and growing in the future as an alternative to encyclopedias, or better yet, an expansion upon that format, but as an alternative to content beyond the scope of a concise encyclopedic entry? I hope not.

In my English class, I read Clay Shirky’s article ‘Does the Internet Make You Smarter?’, in which he praises the notion of “cognitive surplus”, the enormous potential of tapping into the vast human networks that have formed on the Internet: “Wikipedia took the idea of peer review and applied it to volunteers on a global scale, becoming the most important English reference work in less than 10 years. Yet the cumulative time devoted to creating Wikipedia, something like 100 million hours of human thought, is expended by Americans every weekend, just watching ads. It only takes a fractional shift in the direction of participation to create remarkable new educational resources.”

The abundance of utilities and ease-of-publishing on the web brings in an influx of amateur content as well but this is not possible without also opening the door to ppen source software such as Wiki platforms allowing for unprecedented intellectual expansion. As rich in content and ever-growing as Wikipedia is today, I think some things about web “culture” will have to change in order for attitudes to shift about Wiki’s purpose and potential, namely integration with other forms of research, understanding of critical evaluation of sources, and for users (especially students and those skeptical about Wikipedia!) to understand how to make quality article edits. The lack of diversity in the Wikipedian editor demographic is frustrating as well, although I think this largely has to do, again, with a culture around what it means to be a participant in the free encyclopedia almost anyone can edit: shouldn’t building a repository of accessible knowledge should matter to all of us?