Wikipedia
May 7, 2009
When I was a kid and I had a school assignment the first thing I did to find out information on the topic was to go to the computer, insert the Encarta CD and look it up. I thought it was great with all the pictures, sounds and animation. My next stop would be the library to find books related to the topic. Now, with a Web2.0 environment so easily accessible, Wikipedia has taken the place of Encarta CD-roms, hard copy encyclopaedias, and books.
Wikipedia acts a first point of reference for many people in today’s society and is perceived as one of the key drivers of the Web2.0 social software phenomenon, alongside blogs. But that doesn’t mean it is the best source of information. University lecturers do not accept Wikipedia as a credible or reliable source of information. I agree with this stance because you can’t always believe hear-say, and that’s basically what Wikipedia is. Wikipedia’s motto ‘anyone can edit’ is based on the fact that any person can participate in the editing of a Wikipedia entry and no formal qualifications or attribution are required. To me, this does little to represent its credibility. Even the actual Wikipedia entry on Wikipedia highlights the potential of Wikipedia to be unreliable and inaccurate!
Regardless of these limitations, Wikipedia is one of the most widely used websites on the Internet, with its popularity being reflected through its dominant presence within search engine results. Wikipedia with its creative collaboration and management of knowledge, is a prime example of produsage, incorporating a new value chain where the Internet is the tool of distribution, and the consumer and the producer are one in the same. I had to laugh when I came across a peculiar comparison of using Wikipedia to visiting a public restroom. “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”. I can totally relate to and agree with this concept, alluded to by Robert McHenry, former editor in chief of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I think that it is ok to use Wikipedia to get a general idea about something, however you should definitely follow it up with further research from more credible sources.
A similar project called Nupedia was designed to make its articles of a quality comparable to that of professional encyclopedias. Unlike Wikipedia, Nupedia was not a wiki, instead Nupedia depended on established experts and a traditional, editor-based content review process. Bruns states that it was this process that determined Nupedia’s ultimate failure because of the specific denial of the preconditions for produsage: trust in the equipotentiality of the contributor base, pursuit of a probalistic approach to content creation proceses, establishment of granular content creation practices, and embrace of a shared ownership of outcomes.
Agreeing with the rest room analogy and with the belief that Wikipedia should not be used as an academic source, one must realise as well that rest rooms do have cleaners and as such the dirt and grime that often finds its way around the sink does get cleaned up and removed. This happens in the realms of wikipedia as well. Even though it is not an academic source, enough people are constantly adding, critiquing and editing the work written so that a truth is indeed presented.
Harking back to the idea of open participation, communal evaluation. One of the key principals of produsage, a definite benefit of wikipedia is in fact in the public nature of the site – ‘…the assumption within the produsage community is that the more participants are able to examine, evaluate, and add to the contributions of their predecessors, the more likely an outcome of strong and increasing quility will be (bruns,2008)’ Wikipedia demonstrates its ability to restore any of its vandalisms and heal any of its wounds. Michael Agger reflects this in an article on Slate.com entitled “WIkipedia Unmasked’ stating that Vandals can be tracked backed based on the IP Adresses of those making the changes and through a wikiscanner.