Whiling away the hours with wikipedia

It's Saturday night and yours truly is at work. Oh the joy of 24/7 radio. Anyhoo, I was just writing a thing about Wikipedia and how some of their articles are now protected from editing by chuds like you and me (via New York Times here) and I found this. It's a rather fab way of wasting time. When you click on it, Wikipedia present for your reading pleasure a random article from their extensive encyclopedia. It's like how they put up a random article every day as their homepage but better. Using it, I have read all about West Edmonton Mall, The Great Hedge of India (yes it really is a hedge), The Politics of East Germany, and American astronaut Ed Lu. Fun!

Comments

[Katie]

Interesting...my problem with Wikipedia is that there is no way to know whether an article is accurate or not. Their claim that things become more accurate the more they are edited is an interesting one, but I'm not sure I necessarily buy it. As a professor, I've had to tell my students that it's not an acceptable source for research papers, though they are free to use it as a guide to find other information. I tell them that their sources need to be attributable to an identifiable person or organization. I teach for an online university, so many of my students use the Internet almost exclusively for their research (including the University's online library with access to eBooks, ProQuest and such). I have a lot of military students, including some who are currently deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan, or wherever, so Internet research is their only option. I'm just trying to encourage them to use the more reliable sources of information (even though it's a little harder).

[Katie]

It must be so tempting to use wikipedia for essays but it's just not quite safe enough. But it is just such a rich source of information. I use it in briefings for work but I'm always keen to stress where I've got my information from. It usually forms part of the briefing for a live interview so if there's anything really suprising in there the presenter can just ask about it and it's fine. I wouldn't want to take anything from wikipedia and put it in print attributable to me... Internet research is tricky for other reasons, I could never figure out how to write my references and bibliographies with online resources!

[kurtrik]

I think there are two things that would ensure reliability with the wikipedia model.
a) references: If everyone who contributed made sure that they were synthesising previously published work, then the idea of continual editing towards the perfect entry is probably possible.
b) traffic: if one knew that each page was being viewed regularly by a network of individuals, then it would be less likely for mistakes to remain unedited.

In my leftie views, the relative openness of wikipedia is a dream come true! The idea of placing a resource like this in the hands and (relative) control of the public domain (and taking it out of the hands of, say Microsoft, i.e. Encarta) is rare and powerful, and in my opinion should be cherished. So what it boils down to really is whether or not you believe in the goodness of people, that we can all work towards building this. (OK. Sorry for the hippie talk.)

[kurtrik]

oh one more thing! i just recently heard about current efforts to make a wikipedia-like site for lab protocols! sites such as these would be incredibly invaluable. you don't know how many times i've scoured the web/papers for specific standard protocols.

see nature news article (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v441/n7094/full/441678a.html)

[MT]

Protection of articles on wikipedia has been going on for years. That NYTimes article baffled me.

[MT]

I used to contribute to wikipedia, but got tired of seeing my nice factual sentences over written with clumsy misleading or inaccurate sentences and having to debate nuances of my dissertation topic with twelve year olds, who'd win the point if there were more of them. The problem is the twelve year-olds outnumber the experts on any topic, excepting maybe Britney Spears (where they're one and the same), and it's writing by consensus. Well, not quite true: If you're expert in something obscure, you may be safe. But if your topic is covered in a freshman prereq. or highschool, watch out. It's editor's sans fronteirs.

[Ithika]

@Katie:

How do you - or your students - know that any source of information is accurate? Most encyclopaedia are wrong in some way. Scientific papers can be fraudulent, or bad results supressed. Newspapers regularly print utter nonsense about everything. (Any event which I have had personal knowledge of, and seen reported in the mainstream press, bears this out. I can't be the only one.) The inaccuracy of WP is not a one-off. It fits in with every other source of information out there.

[Nia Williams]

On the subject of the random article on Wikipedia there is a little game attached:

Pick a subject (use the random article or something really obscure) -this is your target.

Load another random article and use the inner-encylcopedia hyper links to reach the target atrticle.

Person with the least amount of links in the chain wins and gets to set the next article.

Hours of fun.

[kurtrik]

Nia, brilliant! I'm going to go play right now...

[Katie]

I could honestly keep clicking on that random thing all night. I just found out about the needle drop, a technique of hip hop deejaying (Dj-ing, surely?) that was invented by the Grand Wizard Theodore. And the extreme points of Croatia. And Lady Kale of the animated television series Princess Gwenevere and the Jewel Riders. Love wikipedia.

[Katie]

Ithika -

Neither I nor my students can necessarily know whether any source of information is accurate. However, if the information is attirbutable to an identifiable person or organization, it is at least possible to make an educated assessment of the likelihood that the information is reliable.