Thoughtful post by Lorcan Dempsey…

I was looking at an announcement on the University of Edinburgh’s site about The British Academy Warton Lecture on Poetry, to be given this year on Yeats by his biographer Roy Foster. A distinguished event! I was interested looking to the bottom of the page to see links to the Wikipedia pages for both Yeats and Warton.

This seemed to me to show Wikipedia’s growing role as an addressable knowledge base. It makes further information about a topic available at the end of a URL. It relieves people of having to create their own context and background. As in this case, context, or condensed background, about Warton and Yeats is available for linking, relieving the developers of having to provide it themselves.

Condensed background is a phrase used by Timothy Burke, history professor at Swarthmore, and author of the Burn the catalog piece of some years back. I was rereading Burn the catalog earlier and was interested to come across his blog discussion of Wikipedia.

“I’m using Wikipedia this semester where it seems appropriate: to provide quick, condensed background on a historical subject as preparation for a more general discussion. Next week, for example, the students are having a quick look at the Malthus entry as part of a broader discussion of critiques of progress in the Enlightenment.”

And he goes on to comment on the Middlebury decision which is discussed in my post of the other day.

“Big deal. The folks at Middlebury are perfectly correct to say that students shouldn’t be using Wikipedia as an evidentiary source in research papers. That’s got nothing to do with Wikipedia’s “unreliability”, or the fact that it’s on the web, or anything else of that sort. It’s because you don’t cite an encyclopedia article as a source when you’re writing an undergraduate paper in a history course at a selective liberal-arts college. Any encyclopedia is just a starting place, a locator, a navigational beacon. I’d be just as distressed at reading a long research paper in my course that used the Encylopedia Britannica extensively. As a starting place, Wikipedia has an advantage over Brittanica, though: it covers more topics, is easier to access and use, and frankly often has a fairly good set of suggestions about where to look next.”

He uses Wikitedium in the title of the post, and I thought how apt an expression this was to characterize the periodic library discussions about Wikipedia which pitch authority against editorial permissiveness.

Wikipedia is a collection. Some entries are excellent, some less so. One cannot summarily judge its value in the way that one might have done when deciding whether or not to buy or recommend a reference book. Judgements about ‘authority’ and utility have to be made at the article level, and who has the time and expertise to flag individual articles in this way? Rather than continuing a tedious Wikipedia good/Wikipedia bad conversation, we should recognize the attraction it has as an addressable knowledge base, understand the variety of uses to which it is put, and remind folks of the judgments they need to make depending on those uses.

Yet another tired article on the subject of “Can Wikipedia Ever Make the Grade?” Wonder why people continue to publish this stuff — especially a supposedly high-class site like The Chronicle (of Higher Education)? The article starts in the predictable way of such guff — with a good-news story:

Two years ago, when he was teaching at the State University of New York at Buffalo, the professor hatched a plan designed to undermine the site’s veracity — which, at that time, had gone largely unchallenged by scholars. Adopting the pseudonym “Dr. al-Halawi” and billing himself as a “visiting lecturer in law, Jesus College, Oxford University,” Mr. Halavais snuck onto Wikipedia and slipped 13 errors into its various articles. He knew that no one would check his persona’s credentials: Anyone can add material to the encyclopedia’s entries without having to show any proof of expertise.

Some of the errata he inserted — like a claim that Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist, had made Syracuse, N.Y., his home for four years — seemed entirely credible. Some — like an Oscar for film editing that Mr. Halavais awarded to The Rescuers Down Under, an animated Disney film — were more obviously false, and easier to fact-check. And others were downright odd: In an obscure article on a short-lived political party in New Brunswick, Canada, the professor wrote of a politician felled by “a very public scandal relating to an official Party event at which cocaine and prostitutes were made available.”

Mr. Halavais expected some of his fabrications to languish online for some time. Like many academics, he was skeptical about a mob-edited publication that called itself an authoritative encyclopedia. But less than three hours after he posted them, all of his false facts had been deleted, thanks to the vigilance of Wikipedia editors who regularly check a page on the Web site that displays recently updated entries. On Dr. al-Halawi’s “user talk” page, one Wikipedian pleaded with him to “refrain from writing nonsense articles and falsifying information.”

Mr. Halavais realized that the jig was up.

Writing about the experiment on his blog (http://alex .halavais.net), Mr. Halavais argued that a more determined “troll” — in Web-forum parlance, a poster who contributes only inflammatory or disruptive content — could have done a better job of slipping mistakes into the encyclopedia. But he said he was “impressed” by Wikipedia participants’ ability to root out his fabrications. Since then several other high-profile studies have confirmed that the site does a fairly good job at getting its facts straight — particularly in articles on science, an area where Wikipedia excels.

Experienced readers will know what follows next — the “but” clause. And, lo!, here it is:

Among academics, however, Wikipedia continues to receive mixed — and often failing — grades. Wikipedia’s supporters often portray the site as a brave new world in which scholars can rub elbows with the general public. But doubters of the approach — and in academe, there are many — say Wikipedia devalues the notion of expertise itself.

The rest of the piece then rehashes a lot of old stuff that anyone with access to an RSS feed has read a thousand times. What I’d really like to see is something that moves on the discussion about user-generated reference material.