Interesting post in Lorcan Dempsey's blog (influential librarian-blogger) relates two interesting stories (neither of which are unique/new to us, but interesting nevertheless):
"Using Wikipedia" February 13: http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/002155.html Story one. "Edward Glaeser includes a reference to Wikipedia in the acknowledgements to his new book, *Triumph of the city <http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/650211168>* : 'Following common practices, Wikipedia is not listed in the bibliography or citations, because any Wikipedia fact was verified with a more standard source. But I still have a great debt to the anonymous toilers of Wikipedia who made my research much easier at many points in time. I apologize if any phrases from that, or any other source, crept into my prose - one research assistant was assigned the explicit task of purging such inadvertent borrowing - but mistakes do sometimes get through. [272-273]' " Story two. "My daughter (a sophomore in high school) was given an assignment to introduce errors into Wikipedia. Presumably, the intention was to demonstrate that entries could be 'unreliable'. Now, she chose a popular page, and had her changes corrected almost straightaway, to the extent that it was not possible to complete the assignment as given. In fact, she ended up being barred from editing pages as her behavior was seen as unacceptable." >From which he goes on to say... "Wikipedia is a collection. ... 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." Nice. -Liam wittylama.com/blog Peace, love & metadata _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
