Wikipedia

Virginia Tech Massacre entry on Wikipedia and how it grew and grew….some people turned to that site first for their news.

• Schiff, New Yorker• If you look up “coffee preparation”

on Wikipedia, you will find your way, via the entry on Espresso, to a piece on types of espresso machines, which you will want to consult before buying.

history

“The encyclopedic impulse dates back more than two thousand years….”

this is Robert Darnton, Princeton

History Prof.; expert on Encyclopedia history

DarntonStudied encylopedias in 18th CenturyFrance;Encyclopedias were forums for debate!

• First encyclopedias: developed from the dictionary in the 18th century

• They offered a forum for controversy and debate

• People used to gather around encyclopedia readers and debate how true the content was.

Schiff:

“Bayle taught readers to doubt, a lesson in subversion that Diderot and d’Alembert, the authors of the Encyclopédie (1751-80), learned well. Their thirty-five-volume work preached rationalism at the expense of church and state. The more stolid Britannica was born of cross-channel rivalry and an Anglo-Saxon passion for utility.”

Some of the problems with Wikipedia:Is it accurate?

Schiff: “Is Wikipedia accurate? Last year, Nature published a survey comparing forty-two entries on scientific topics on Wikipedia with their counterparts in Encyclopædia Britannica.”

Britannica fights backWikipedia and Essjay ControversyCall for accuracy in Wikipedia

If: Book• we should learn how to read Wikipedia in the fullest

way: by exploring the discussion pages and revision histories that contextualize each article, and to get involved ourselves as writers and editors. Take a look at the page on global warming, and then pop over to its editorial discussion, with over a dozen archived pages going back to December, 2001. Dense as hell, full of struggle.

• “To roam its pages is to be in contact, whether directly or subliminally, with a powerful new idea of how information gets made. And it's far from safe.”

• Mohammad and controversy

• Wikibooks

• “wikify”

• Wikipedia infilatrated by PR hacks• EA responds

• Conflict of Interest Policy

Wikipedia as a research starting point