1:34 AM. A student putting the finishing touches on a research paper ventures onto the information highway, scanning the horizon for more facts to help him elaborate on a point. Though the entire Internet is at his fingertips, he turns once again to an old friend: Wikipedia. Weeks later, he receives a disappointingly low grade. He soon founds out why: A teacher's emphatic hand writes in red ink, "Wikipedia is not a source!"
Wikipedia, perhaps the most popular of the "wiki" family out there, has received a great deal of criticism not unlike the one mentioned above. Students, bloggers, politicians, and experts grapple with the same question of what to make of Wikipedia, a global village whose expanding borders seem to teem with both intellectual and idiotic information. I myself believe that Wikipedia should be cast in a more positive light, and that anti-Wiki protesters should at least consider the merits of Wikipedia more closely before being so quick to denounce it as an anathema to all that is respectable about an encyclopedia.
"Wiki" means, in the "official" definition, a place where website visitors can jointly contribute towards the content of the site itself. Those opposed to the wiki format cite cynical reasons as to why such a concept is an ineffective way of running a website. Among other concerns includes the deliberate or accidental errors that often come about when amateurs seek to record knowledge, a pursuit in the pre-Wiki era left to entirely experts. In other words, opponents of Wikipedia cite the disastrous implications of "mob rule": a drastic oversimplification of complex topics that will occur in the hands of the common people.
While it is true that esoteric topics are often broken down so they can be more easily digested by the masses, this "pre-chewing" of hard-to-swallow topics is not necessarily as repulsive of a method as opponents make it out to be. My teachers even advocate this, saying "sometimes one needs to hear it from somebody else, like peers, to understand it better." Wikipedia follows the teacher's advice by taking otherwise confusing articles and transforming them into everyday layman's terms. It makes the concept much easier to understand, and it saves the reader time spent otherwise trying to get around the dense language of a scholarly article. Furthermore, Wikipedia uses links to lead the reader to pages explaining any unknown terms that may appear while reading. These two strategies: providing an adequate paraphrase of the essence of a topic and links on unknown terms is not unique to Wikipedia--the same approaches are found also on MSN's online Encarta encyclopedia. That is precisely the point: Wikipedia is not a wild child that has broken entirely with its ancestors. It instead preserves much of the same structure as the traditional, professionally written encyclopedias.
Since it is a wiki, the number of articles on Wikipedia has exploded to huge numbers, with its more than 1,370,000 articles dwarfing the 118,000 Encyclopedia Britannica articles currently online. Though the saying "quality over quantity" may be a potential jumping off point for people who contend Wikipedia's quality has degenerated with its growing size in the past few years, Wikipedia has in general been able to balance the load of quality versus quantity quite well. Wiki sites are vulnerable to vandalism--the site is basically a 24/7 invitation to contribute or to "hack" the entry. Therefore, one would expect to find articles filled with crude humor and pictures, as the horror stories suggest. However, this is simply not the case, and exceptions to this rule are negligible. The flagrant violations of a well-defined Wiki-editing law are taken extremely seriously in the Wiki community, with dedicated Wikipedians editing out inappropriate content almost instantly after they appear. For example, when Stephen Colbert and his fans went on a hilarious but wild editing spree on a page concerning elephants in Africa, a group of amateur editors, not amused by Colbert's assertion that the population of elephants had tripled in the past year, pulled out all of their strategies to counteract the virtual graffiti defacing the article. They disabled editing, limiting on those specific pages to only registered accounts of more than four days of age and reverted all pages to the pre-show changes by using the "see history" tab. The rapid response of Wikipedia reveals its elastic nature and ability to keep up with the rapidly altering zeitgeist. Following the death of Steve Irwin, for example, his article was almost instantaneously (I checked 23 minutes from the time the news broke on the wires) updated with details of his death, and subsequent additions greatly increased the details of his life and career. There is little question to Wikipedia's ability to collect information, and it does so in a timely manner, keeping its readers informed of even the most recent of events.
This fast-paced, constantly changing landscape of Wikipedia is both a blessing and a burden. The countless changes made to articles literally each second reinforces Wikipedia's image as a flowing fountain for the latest information. Relevancy, therefore, is Wikipedia's strong suit. It has mass appeal because it has the ability to cover a wide smattering of the non-academia side of society: newly released movies, TV shows, books, media figures, etc.
Unfortunately, the rapid changes to Wikipedia's articles means that it lacks the static stability of other non-wiki encyclopedias, and critics point out that information that may have been located there one minute would be gone by the next, resulting in great confusion for the reader. What they fail to mention is that though most of the "rapid-fire" changes occur in articles relating to the news or popular culture which are inundated with new information each day, readers are informed clearly by a banner that this article represents a current event and is subject to change. Moreover, in order to be accurate, swift updates are absolutely necessary. If an article doesn't exist, readers can even create new articles--thereby reinforcing the image of Wikipedia as a place of knowledge acutely attuned to the real world.
Though many people make changes to the site everyday, not all of these amateur editors write in grammatically correct, objective prose. Indeed, confusing syntax and misspellings does appear occasionally in some articles, making it hard for the reader to follow the logic behind the entry. Nevertheless, Wikipedia, existing ever in its state of perpetual motion, has called upon its readers to self-police and actively correct these badly written entries. This can never happen on a non-wiki website where editing is severely curbed, and thus if a reader doesn't understand the entry he can only choose to struggle through it, lodge a complaint with no guarantee of a rapid response, or choose another source. Wikipedia contains a number of discussion portals where editors can work out conflicting facts and discuss what needs to be changed on an article.
As for objectivity, the favorite argument is that Wikipedia has no formal peer review and therefore is a large "mud pit" of conflicting opinions. These claims are directed, though, towards a small section of Wikipedia's entries. The science and technology sections of Wikipedia are solid--this makes sense, for these areas don't allow for much subjectivity anyways. As for the other articles, one must realize that no piece of published information is ever written from a neutral point-of-view, and to criticize Wikipedia on these impossible ideals is simply unfair.
An amusing anecdote I found on Wikipedia perhaps phrases best the hidden purpose of the encyclopedia. Some student had written on the reference help desk: "Democracy in America, by Alexis De Tocqueville / What is the significance and relevancy of this writing?" Below on the line was a short response: "To show you how to do your own homework." Granted, that was a jab at the student's sense of laziness, but these words could be applied to Wikipedia as well. Readers themselves need to realize that Wikipedia is not a one-stop shop, and they shouldn't use it as a single source of knowledge. They should be aware that Wikipedia, and for that matter any other medium where knowledge is transmitted, is subjective. They should "do their own homework" and cross-reference these entries with other sources. This applies not only to Wikipedia, but to the other encyclopedic websites considered previously infallible.
Wikipedia has indirectly taught us how to question what seems to be the established truth. With more articles comes more people who will hopefully learn from Wikipedia that knowledge should be treated with a more careful and skeptic eye. Wikipedia awakens a person's impulse to think about what they have heard or read, instead of passively accepting what is presented. And when the person has found an error, he can do what no reader has done before--change the wrong into right himself. Wikipedia, if for no other reason, empowers us, the ordinary readers, with the extraordinary chance of making our voices heard in the world.
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