Chapter 4: Wikis for all

I often feel I somehow missed the boat when it comes to wikis. All the sudden there existed this massive and somewhat specious site known as Wikipedia. College kids dug it and college professors hated it. I, being the good student I was, stuck with the professional opinion. Now, however, I read Richardson saying that Wikipedia and wikis in general have arrived, unencumbered by the former doubtful claims of professionals: "'Four out of five [experts] agreed their relevant Wikipedia entries are accurate, informative, comprehensive and a great resource for students'" (p. 58). I suppose you can't argue with the statistics. Indeed, I have come around to using Wikipedia as a resource for knowledge; my Safari and Firefox browsers come ready-made with a Wikipedia link in the bookmark bar; it seems everyone has come around. And yet there still persists that nagging doubt, that maybe Wikipedia isn't all it's cracked up to be. For instance, for a website that's touted to be the sum of human knowledge (Richardson p. 55), I have personally experienced how selective that knowledge happens to be. When my bandmates noticed a few years back that one of our labelmates had a Wikipedia page assigned to them, we thought to ourselves, "Why not us?" So we gathered the most pertinent information we could regarding ourselves and created a page based around the band. But what a storm of controversy it brewed! From the get-go it was disputed by Wikipedia's editors as having "nothing ... to justify inclusion." It's not that the editors thought we were just making it up. It's that they thought it wasn't important enough to include in the "sum of human knowledge." 

I suppose the editors were just trying to keep Wikipedia "respectable." If every kid in a crappy garage band had a mind to, he could create a wikipedia page dedicated to an endeavor that lasted perhaps six months and garnered no more fans than their girlfriends... Perhaps that's what I feel is the ultimate flaw in the justification for Wikipedia: you can't claim something to be the sum of human knowledge while simultaneously excluding human knowledge. The reason the editors of Wikipedia tried to exclude our page (we ultimately won the day) was that they were in the market for significant human knowledge, i.e. knowledge that many people have and care about. But what resources besides the Internet were the editors using to verify the validity that we were an established and semi-important artistic force? Isn't there still the possibility of important things happening completely outside the scope of the Internet? If so, what envoys do they commission to gather this information? 

My point here is not that Wikipedia is not reliable or beneficial for students. Rather, it's that it cannot and should not be considered a final authority. While it is true perhaps that textbook publishers are worried about the pervasiveness of Wikipedia (Richardson p. 62), but I suspect there are professionals out there other than greedy publishers who are worried as well. Wikipedia cannot be the final authority because as wonderful as it is that just anyone can create and contribute to "creating truth" (Richardson p. 57) on a page, those random individuals are not necessarily professionals in the field getting paid to be thorough. Rather, they are kids, teenagers, adults, many developing a field in which they are not competent to be considered a final authority. They are helpers, to be sure, and Wikipedia is a wonderful resource for anyone looking for a quick answer, but God help us if it becomes the definition of research.