Robbins Library Notes

Wikipedia articles have a bad reputation among academics and librarians of being of dubious provenance, poor quality, and low accuracy. From what I have been reading, many are usually quick to discourage or forbid students from using Wikipedia in their research.*

Yet, in spite of all the criticisms and questions, Wikipedia endures, thrives, and grows. Google is even preparing a product — the “knol” — to compete with Wikipedia. It would appear that Wikipedia and its competitors are not going away any time in the near future.

Does this mean that professors (and librarians) should embrace Wikipedia, or at least give it another look? Mark A. Wilson offers an argument for doing so in InsideHigherEd.com.

A hat-tip to Bookforum.com for this article.

*In the interest of full-disclosure: I do not share this view of Wikipedia. I have used it on occasion, to get quick background information about something that I’m researching. And I have cited articles from it in an introduction to philosophy that I wrote last year. In short, as a handy and ready source of information on a topic, Wikipedia is fairly reliable.

Nonetheless — and my regular readers will know this — I do not endorse using Wikipedia alone, just as I do not endorse using any reference source alone. Good research and searching includes triangulating information and research and critically evaluating sources, as I’ve written about elsewhere, and Wikipedia is no exception. I generally try to confirm what I read in a Wikipedia article from other sources, to ensure accuracy.