Wikipedia gets me up on my soapbox...big time!

It's difficult to ignore Wikipedia. It's right there, all the time, the first or second entry in my hit list when I search for almost anything on the internet - musicians, authors, places, wines, philosophers. My general impression of Wikipedia at the beginning of this assignment was that it was ubiquitous but unreliable and therefore not very useful.

Of course, it's hard to talk about a thing without comparing it to something else. So here's what I did:

I searched the following terms:
Edward Abbey - American author and environmentalist
Jesse Cook - Canadian flamenco guitarist
Cochrane Alberta - where I live
Tempranillo - type of Spanish grape/wine
Arthur Schopenhauer - German philosopher
Marc Atkinson Trio - Canadian gypsy jazz musical group
West Coast Trail - famous hiking trail on the west coast of Vancouver Island

Places I searched:
Wikipedia
Google
Britannica Online
Canadian Encylopedia Online

And the winner is...Wikipedia!

And here I was, all prepared to trash talk with a hastily scribbled list of negatives. Well, I'll get to those in a minute, but first...

What I like about Wikipedia

Truly encyclopedic, it's a great first place to begin searching for almost anything, from grapes to guitarists, towns to trails. While there was an exasperating dearth of hits for most of my searches using Britannica or the Canadian Encyclopedia, and Google overwhelmed with a profusion of results that frustrated and distracted me, Wikipedia strikes a nice balance, providing an initial hit with lots of options to expand and explore. Entries are usually written in straightforward simple language, and where I happened to encounter words like anthropocentrism or rubato or aphoristic (I keep forgetting that one!), there was always a handy hyperlink to enlighten me.

The Contents box lets me see what's included in the article and allows me to jump to a particular section if I don't wish to peruse the entire thing. The See Also, References and further reading, and External Links offer access to interesting tangents, discographies and bibliographies, but also primary source documents that are important for research purposes.

The discussion and history tabs are interesting as they allow a glimpse into any behind-the-scenes controversy that may be taking place regarding various aspects of the article, and these could be used as cues to do more investigation on those points.

What I don't like so much about Wikipedia

Where'd my scribbled notes go? Oh, yea...

I nearly drowned beneath the apparently infinite ocean of information available in About Wikipedia. Unlike most Web 2.0 technologies that I've explored via concise Help, About, and FAQ pages, Wikipedia's introductory information is...what's the word...well, it made me feel hopeless of ever grasping the intricacies of how it worked. I'd read for a bit, then click on a link of particular interest such as administrators, researching with Wikipedia, or reliability of Wikipedia and end up in yet another labyrinthine article with even more links. This is not a good place to be for someone with obsessive compulsive tendencies (like me), who feels compelled to read all the introductory material before using the technology!

My other beef with Wikipedia is more a general dispute I have with the idea it seems to put forward that openly-edited content is better than non-openly-edited content. I'm not sure I buy that, always. (Warning! I'm climbing up on my soapbox here.) Call me crazy, but sometimes I like to know that the person who wrote the information I'm reading is an actual, qualified, certified, recognized expert in that field, not just a self-described expert. Go to Wikipedia:Administrators and scroll on down to the History section where you'll find this quote by Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia co-founder:

I think perhaps I'll go through semi-willy-nilly and make a bunch of people who have been around for awhile sysops. I want to dispel the aura of "authority" around the position. It's merely a technical matter that the powers given to sysops are not given out to everyone.

Hmmm. Argh! There's so much that I take issue with in those three sentences. Let me summarize by saying that it's not a statement that inspires trust and confidence in the system about which the person is speaking.

Or how about this line from Wikipedia:How to edit a page: "After your first edit, you will be a Wikipedia editor!" Really? Can I put that on my resume? Like it's some sort of important achievement. For me, it's somehow tied into our current preoccupation with: I've got to tell the entire world what I'm doing every second of the day on Facebook or Twitter, I've got to post all these videos about my riveting life on YouTube, I deserve my 15 minutes of fame on a "reality" TV show, I should get to add my two cents to any forum discussing anything I'm remotely familiar with, oh, and let's not forget...I've got lots to wax eloquent about on my blog! Obviously, I'm being slightly hypocritical and facetious here as I'm frequently on my FaceBook account, I have thrown in my two cents in forum discussions (mostly on travel issues), and well, here I am blogging...  

Assignment

In keeping with the previous rant, I don't fancy myself enough of an expert on anything to feel comfortable editing Wikipedia. I found quite a few links with no pages attached that I suppose I could have written a brief entry for, but decided to make a small spelling adjustment my first time out. Under the History section of the article on the West Coast Trail, I changed the word Pacheenaht (with an n) to Pacheedaht (with a d). Although the "n" spelling is not incorrect, the "d" spelling is certainly much more common, and is found in many places including the Parks Canada information on hiking the WCT and the BC government website.

Conclusion

My revised impression of Wikipedia is that it's ubiquitous, maybe unreliable, but a very useful jumping-off point.