My love affair with Wikipedia began – like most others in my life – with alcohol.
In this case it involved an $11 bottle of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. No occasion, just another Thursday night spent like every other inner-north bike-riding 20-something: watching Mad Men on SBS TV.
I was contemplating January Jones’ frock when I realised I didn’t know where “that guy” was from. Not Don Draper, but the “other guy”.
I yelled the question to my both patient and resourceful partner. The instant reply was: “His name is Vincent and he is a child actor from ‘The Indian in the Cupboard.’”
The information did not impress me, nor make me think so highly of Mad Men’s casting department. The fascinating thing was the speed at which it was delivered.
No more trawling through countless Google entries for me! My opinion of Wikipedia was transformed; I was smitten.
For the uninitiated, Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia, and the largest and fastest growing of its kind. Up until that night, the only way it had enriched my life was by causing every stuffy university lecturer I’d ever had to pucker their faces and scoff at it.
That’s because Wikipedia is a massive no-no in the land of credible research. Instead of paid writers, researchers and editors, the content is entirely user-generated. Which means everyone from my socially inept upstairs neighbour to the local dentist can all chip in their two-cents worth.
This sometimes leads to the website being used as an online battleground on, say, the origins of hummus (is it Arabic or Israeli?) and controversial information on the merits of scientology. (In May Wikipedia blocked the Church of Scientology from altering entries.)
For traditionalists, such skirmishes have only raised more questions about Wikipedia’s credibility. But things are looking up.
Earlier this month, global Wikipedia representatives flew to Canberra for a world-first meeting to discuss the future of the site. The meeting included 170 people from Australia’s most important cultural institutions: our art galleries, libraries, and national museums.
The goal was to figure out how to make the expertise and information stored in their dusty archives easily accessible to the world through Wikipedia.
This idea of collecting the best of minds everywhere was actually the original idea of the creators of Wikipedia.
It was launched in 2001 by a couple of cyber geeks whose first foray into the net-boom was using peer-to-peer technology to link together their two passions: Pamela Anderson and Anna Kournikova. Though I’m not quite sure how staring at these two leads one to planning encyclopedias, but I suppose we all get our inspiration from different places, so who am I to judge?
The ambitious students wanted to create an open source encyclopedia project that combined the sum-total of human wisdom.
This is exactly what makes Wikipedia special today.
Everyone contributing to the site has an equal voice, irrespective of their title, credentials or scholarly achievements. There are equal editing rights, and also a wiki-court and arbitration committee to penalise fraudsters.
The result? A site that is accessible, global, completely free and easy enough for even my grandmother to use.
And all that hoopla about it being unreliable is quickly being overshadowed.
The New York Times recently said that Wikipedia’s information is now improved, fact-checked, footnoted and enhanced over time. And maybe not all the information it contains is highbrow, but you couldn’t dare call it limited.
Some of the most visited searches this month include: World War Two, swine flu, John Hughes, India, Miley Cyrus, Barack Obama, Metallica, socialism and….vaginas. Wikipedia is a realistic reflection of what we care about and what we know, unmediated and unbiased.
All-in-all a pretty damn versatile piece of online real estate!
Liam Wyatt, Vice-President of Wikipedia’s parent company, Wikimedia, said that Wikipedia is the fourth-most visited site in the world, and the largest education resource ever.
When questioned by The Age about the site’s much publicised errors and controversy he said, “Wikipedia and Wiki projects do have mistakes. We know that, and we actually celebrate that. We don’t pretend that wiki sites are error free or perfect because they are constantly evolving processes. There’s an old phrase: People who like sausages or obeying the law shouldn’t see either being made, and the same goes for encyclopedias – it’s a messy process but the outcome is really good.”
The Guardian acknowledges it as one of the biggest open repositories of knowledge in the world.
The newspaper reported that Wikipedia is due to hit the 3 million mark of articles any day now.
This equals 25 times more information than the next-largest English language encyclopedia – The Britannica.
But I bet The Britannica would struggle to keep me updated on Mad Men.
Sarah Dailey is a final-year Journalism student at La Trobe University.
Email this article
Tags: Mad Men, Sarah Dailey, sbs, The Age, The Guardian, Wikipedia
6 Comments
sarah, i love this article!
Nice story. I agree Wikipedia has become a first-call resource for many people in many contexts.
I use Wikipedia myself for a variety of purposes – in business, as a source of background information when writing and (of course) for pop culture “stuff”.
But I have had to totally ban Wikipedia as a reference citation in student assignments submitted for assessment in my classes!
Lecturing at postgraduate level in advertising and communications, I have been surprised to find that many students seem unable to discriminate between, on the one hand, authoritative primary sources and, on the other, web-based sources like Wikipedia that are secondary references consolidating material from other sources.
In other words, anything you can find in Wikipedia should be able to be found in another, more specific and authoritative, source in the first place!
It is disturbing to find students citing Wikipedia as the reference for concepts and terms that are more thoroughly defined in their own texbooks and reference libraries.
The “wisdom of crowds” is usually (but not invariably) relevant and accurate in areas like pop culture. But crowd-sourcing is not acceptable in university assignments!
Interesting article, Sarah. I have a Wikipedia v Encyclopaedia Britannica anecdote for you. One of my research interests is in western writing about Thailand, particularly Anna Leonowens, the teacher whose story inspired The King and I. When I checked Britannica’s entry on Leonowens, I found that it was well out of date. In fact, I don’t think it had been updated for more than 35 years. Since the 1970s, there has been much written about Leonowens and many facts corrected, including her birthdate, which she falsified. Her true birthdate was revealed in 1976 in a biography about her son. Yet, Britannica still had the old one, had many facts wrong and neglected to mention important information about Leonowens. She spent much of her life, for example, as a pioneering women’s rights and education advocate in Canada. She also worked as a journalist and travelled to Russia alone on assignment. Anyway, I wrote to Britannica and an editor in the US asked if I’d be interested in updating the Leonowens entry. Of course, I said yes. That was late last year. He said it would take time to get the go-ahead as he could only authorise so much new work at a time. Then, early this year and in wake of the financial crisis, the editor came back to me and said that, actually, they couldn’t pay for me to rewrite the entry because they didn’t have the budget. However, if I wanted to, I could add my knowledge to Britannica online (no payment, of course). This is the same Britannica that once prided itself on paying experts to provide information and that criticised Wikipedia for relying on free contributions. By the way, the Wikipedia entry on Leonowens was much more up-to-date, though not perfect. I did provide some corrections to Britannica, so at least the birthdate is right now.
By the way, I agree wholeheartedly with Stephen Downes on use of Wikipedia. I suggest students look at it mainly as a way to find sources for further reading.
Well said Sarah!
It’s about time someone spoke about how useful Wikipedia is to us students. Afterall, we do fact check!
One doesn’t have to be a wikigeek to appreciate how useful it is as a early port of call. The good articles abound with sources. Thanks for the piece, Sarah.
On a side note – surely it isn’t the fastest growing of its kind? Wikis are everywhere, and eng.wikipedia hit one million articles waaaay back. Compare that to a wiki on Twilight, or the fast-growing greek wikipedia …