There is once again a minor kerfluffle going on about Wikipedia, with the usual nonsense being spread about it. Some of the more egregious being spread by Danah Boyd:
On topics for which i feel as though i do have some authority, i’m often embarrassed by what appears at Wikipedia. Take the entry for social network: “A social network is when people help and protect each other in a close community. It is never larger than about 150 people.” You have *got* to be kidding me. Aside from being a patently wrong and naive misinterpretation of research, this definition reveals what happens when pop cultural understandings of concepts become authorities.
How serious can you take a criticism of Wikipedia which links to the simple English version of an article and never acknowledges this, even after this had been pointed out in the comments to the post. There’s a reason it’s called simple English.
What also pissed me off was having the following quote by Robert McHenry, Former Editor in Chief, Encyclopedia Britannica, added in an update:
“The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him.”
Note that this comes from an article written for FlackCentralStation, that noted bastion of fair and balanced reporting on various technological and political matters, last seen spreading lies about DDT use and malaria.
And like so much else coming from FlackCentral, this quote makes for a great soundbyte but is wrong in all particulars. Anyone can easily check the history of a wikipedia article, know exactly what the article looked during any given revision and can track the changes in it. Try this with any of the commercial encyclopedias.
In general, this article is an exercise in kicking in open doors: never trust a single source, many students are inclined to be lazy and many students are naive in their research. None of which, an astute observer may notice, is specific to Wikipedia.
It is not that there aren’t real problems with Wikipedia. There is for example, the question of Wikipedia’s systemic bias or the very real problem of it becoming a battleground between various groups of political and religious zealots. But these sort of worries do not make for easy scaremongering or easy sensationalism, so therefore we get these pseudo issues about trust.