What to Do With Wikipedia By William Badke, Trinity Western University (Mar/Apr 2008)
The encyclopedia that everyone loves to hate but has to use - Wikipedia. Academia would ban its use - as would many public librarians I think - but it's just too easy to use. William Badke has some suggestions including that academia get involved in making Wikipedia better (while also getting students to use other online services).
"If you want to get five opinions from four information professionals, just mention Wikipedia. Often banned by professors, panned by traditional reference book publishers, and embraced by just about everyone else, Wikipedia marches on like a great beast, growing larger and more commanding every day. With no paid editors and written by almost anyone, it shouldn’t have succeeded, but it has. In fact, it’s now emerged as the No. 1 go-to information source in the world. It’s used not only by the great unwashed but also by many educated people as well. ONLINE reported on the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s findings that 36% of the American population regularly consult Wikipedia (July/August 2007, p. 6)."
Posted by Gwen at April 4, 2008 06:28 PM