A new radio program called, “Open Source“, hosted by Christopher Lydon is about to be syndicated by Public Radio International. They’ve posted pilot shows on the show website. I just finished listening to Pilot #3 about Wikipedia. Jimbo (wikipedia founder) is along for the entire show. They also talk with a couple of librarians that make we want to hit myself in the head with a sock full of nickels.
They are critical of Wikipedia because:
- Their students are going to wikipedia and using the information as holy gospel.
- Their students are going to wikipedia and plagerizing it because it doesn’t appear to have an owner.
- Every Wikipedia entry is not complete.
- Wikipedia entries may have information that is incorrect.
These same arguments come up in every Wikipedia story and it just drives me crazy. Rewind a few years and this same exact argument came up with the Internet. If you want to feel like you’re living in the dot com boom again, just replace Wikipedia with Internet when the librarians talk. I guess you could replace Wikipedia with any messenger of information.
Librarians, your argument doesn’t change anything. Wikipedia and the Internet are growing and here to stay . Why are you wasting your time complaining when you could be educating your patrons how to think critically. Teach them the difference between an encyclopedia and a primary source. Teach them to check their sources. They themselves bring this up in the interview, and then go right back to dissing the Wikipedia.
The root of their argument is of course their fear that their jobs are obsolete. Well wake the heck up, your job is obsolete. It doesn’t mean you are out of a job, it just means you need to update your job description and the role a library plays in a community. Libraries in many ways are great (I love libraries), but in many other ways they are also inconvenient. The Lisa Simpsons of the world may continue to visit, but for the Bart Simpsons of the world, the library is nerdville and might as well not even exist.
What hurts my head more than being hit with a sock full of nickels, is that I think the librarians agree with me, but because Wikipedia is not in fact the holy gospel of all human knowledge, instead of saying, “it is really cool and helpful, but should be used critically just like any other source”, they seem to suggest that it is just a toy that shouldn’t be used at all. The same could be said for books. There are really crappy books out there. Ones with factual errors, ones with information not appropriate for children, ones that don’t have sources listed. Books are a fun project for its authors and readers, but the reality is the only reality is multiple reality. The only neutral point of view is as many points of view as are available.
Update: I meant to point out that one of the comments on the radio open source website points out the excellent: Wikipedia:Researching with Wikipedia page.
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People look at me like I’m a traitor to my profession when I talk about Wikipedia as a source for anything. I think librarians have a tough time realizing the obsolete job thing AND that unless you’re writing a research paper [and even if, often] most people just sort of want to know *about* something, not necessarily the end-all-be-all-citeable-facts-authoritative-author version that we used to think we were finding int he encylopedias. What I tell people is this: if the author of an encyclopedia has it wrong, there is very little chance to fix the problem. If the same thing happens with Wikipedia, the problem not only gets fixed, it gets vetted and discussed so the same thing won’t happen again. I don’t know why this is so hard for people but it’s been a big ugly mess in the blogosphere lately, especially with librarians getting huffy about Wikipedia when they don’t even know how it works.
Comment by jessamyn 05.22.05 @ 3:02 pmWhat I have noticed is that the Wikipedia community is defensive about criticism. Not conducive to growth.
Comment by K.G. Schneider 07.11.05 @ 6:27 pmLeave a comment
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