Many web searchers have stumbled across Wikipedia without realizing how different a website it is. Recent media attention (e.g., Boxer, 2004)-coupled with increased usage and content milestones like its one-millionth article-call for a closer look.
What is it?
Wikipedia is an open content encyclopedia. That means anyone can be a present-day Diderot, and, with over 100,000 user accounts, many have already answered the call. Whether you want to fix a spelling mistake or start a new article, all you have to do is sign up for a free account, learn the ground rules, and contribute to the communal effort. Actually, even the free account is optional. This is a very different type of encyclopedia, outside the traditional scholarly publishing apparatus, and it indeed challenges traditional notions of authorship.
If this sounds like a recipe for disaster, think of other open-source successes like Linux, and take a closer look. The collective vigilance of the community is the check against everything from spelling errors to factual errors to stylistic shortcomings to malicious “vandalism.” Users currently make around 15,000 edits a day.
Wikis-the concept of community-edited webpages and the software to run them-have been around since the early days of the internet. Wikipedia is a wiki-based project whose mission is to create a free encyclopedia under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), which allows for free access to the encyclopedia's content, and permission to modify and reuse it as long as the new use offers the same license and links back to the original content. Wikipedia was co-founded in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and is now overseen by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation.
Use with caution
Although Wikipedia is “free” of cost, using it is not free of effort. Of course, readers should critically evaluate all information sources (Evaluating, 2004). Readers of Wikipedia need to be especially active in their evaluation. As a work in progress, every article must be considered on its own merit, since it is only as good as the contributions made up to that point.
An article's references section provides a good start for evaluation. An encyclopedia should provide an overview of a subject with suggestions for where to learn more. Thus, Wikipedia guidelines call for contributors to properly cite their sources. But they also call for potential contributors to be bold, reasoning that an imperfect contribution is a better start than no contribution. Therefore, if a reference section hasn't been started the article is not yet well developed. If you need a reliable, comprehensive article, try a specialty encyclopedia in the Library's Reference Section.
The software provides other important tools to evaluate an article's current value. Each article has four tabs: article, discussion, edit this page, and history. When reading an article, also read the discussion, where contributors can explain why they made a particular edit or debate areas for improvement. The history tab tracks every edit, allowing readers to jump back to the article as it existed before each change, or to compare any two versions. The mutable nature of articles makes it more important than ever for authors to include in their reference list the date (and time!) the article was last edited (Citing Wikipedia, 2004) and creates new power for readers to use that information to quickly access exactly what the author read.
So how good is it?
Wikipedia provides many ways to find articles. Use its search engine, or one of its many browsing schemes including Academic Discipline, Decade, or Dewey Decimal.
Historical subjects are treated thoroughly thanks in part to the incorporation of about 3,200 articles from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, which is no longer restricted by copyright. The active user community has expanded greatly on that base, so you can be sure to find information on current events. For example, contributors began an article on Flu vaccine this October, one day after the Chiron Corporation's press release that they would not supply vaccine this season.
Each day, an article the community judges exceptional is featured on the site's homepage. Currently there are 443 Featured Articles. Many articles are still “stubs”-brief definitions awaiting elaboration. If you have the knowledge, time, and inclination, edit the page! That said, there is a lot of material: currently 392,132 articles in the English version alone. Other versions cover over 80 languages and contain another 650,000 articles.
Although contributors write anonymously under usernames, a strong sense of community has developed. An active community interested in medicine is updating the health sciences articles. One recent post in a Clinical Medicine project area called the “Doctors' Mess” asked how they should link to MEDLINE citations in PubMed. Another asked who would read the latest issue of the Lancet to update the articles on HIV and AIDS.
Take a look at articles in your areas of interest and let us know what you think on this page's comments. And consider contributing. The article on Thomas Jefferson University could use some work!
References:
Boxer, S. (2004, November 10). Mudslinging weasels into online history. The New York Times, pp. E1, E8.
Citing Wikipedia (2004, Nov. 12, 3:11 EST). In Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_Wikipedia.
Evaluating information sources. (2004, June). Retrieved November 11, 2004, from http://jeffline.jefferson.edu/SML/helpaids/handouts/Eval_Info_Res.pdf
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