Recently, a lecturer (with a doctorate)
for whom I build and maintain an online course directed her students to an entry
from the Wikipedia as background material for one of the units of her course.
There's certainly nothing wrong, nor particularly out of the ordinary, in assigning
encyclopedia entries for reading in an academic (or any other) course. Encyclopedias
on the whole are recognized as reliable (if also introductory)
sources of information. When, however, an instructor assigns reading from an
encyclopedia, his or her students assume that it's recognized as a well-established
source. After all, the editors of the various entries in encyclopedias are ordinarily
recognized experts in their fields, and the overall editing of an encyclopedia
is a highly professional task. Does the fact that a lecturer directs his or
her students to read an entry from the Wikipedia
mean that he or she recognizes it as a legitimate source? I'm all for it, but
I have to admit that I didn't really expect to see it happen. Or at least this
quickly.
Over the past three years
the Wikipedia has grown - not only in size, but in popularity as well. It has
versions in 50 languages, some of them quite substantial in size, and the end
is far from in sight. My guess is that outside of the rather small group of
true believers (and contributors), what attracts people to it is the fact that
it's free, rather than the fact that it's a continually changing peer-built
resource. I don't have any statistics to back up a claim such as this, but I'd
venture a guess that more often than not when people refer to the Wikipedia
they do so because they've found something they can quote, without even being
aware that there's something "special" about the source. Certainly
there's good reason to be delighted that a substantial source of information
is freely available on the web, but perhaps there's even something a bit distressing
in the fact that (if this is really the case) so many of the people who
use the Wikipedia aren't at all aware of the fact that it's very existence forces
us to question whether authoritative knowledge is actually possible today. After
all, to a certain extent the mere existence of the Wikipedia subverts one of
the basic premises upon which encyclopedias are built.
In order to understand why this is so, it's important to
try and determine just what an encyclopedia is, and what it attempts to accomplish.
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that when trying to find an answer to
questions of this sort the best source is ... well,
an encyclopedia.
The CD-ROM 2001 Deluxe Edition of the Britannica contains a quite comprehensive article on encyclopedias. Among other things in that article, we read that:
... only the encyclopaedia attempts to provide coverage over the whole range of knowledge, and only the encyclopaedia attempts to offer a comprehensive summary of what is known of each topic considered.Elsewhere in that same article, discussing the compilers of two of the first "modern" encyclopedias, we learn that:
Realizing that the reading public would not tolerate the omission of some subjects and the unequal treatment of others, they prepared works in which at least a few lines were devoted to almost every conceivable topic, and for more important subjects a full account was provided, written by an expert, if possible.In other words, encyclopedias attempt to be comprehensive, and expert. They want to tell us as much as is possible about human knowledge, and they want what they tell us to be authoritative and trustworthy - an expert opinion. Does what is written in the Wikipedia meet these criteria?
Wikipedia CANNOT guarantee, in any way whatsoever, the validity of the information found here.And though there's something a bit disappointing in knowing that such a statement really does have to be made, one gets the feeling that just maybe it should appear on other encyclopedias as well.
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