Let's All Whack Wikipedia

Wikipedia must be doing something right that it has so many eminences ranged against it. First Carr, then Lanier (with multiple comments) and now McHenry.

Er, who, you may say? Well, he's the former editor-in-chief of Encyclopedia Britannica, and author of these fine words:

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.

Well, he's back, with somewhat more measured thoughts on the subject:

What is the user meant to take away from the experience of consulting a Wikipedia article? The most candid defenders of the encyclopedia today confess that it cannot be trusted to impart correct information but can serve as a starting-point for research. By this they seem to mean that it supplies some links and some useful search terms to plug into Google. This is not much. It is a great shame that some excellent work – and there is some – is rendered suspect both by the ideologically required openness of the process and by association with much distinctly not excellent work that is accorded equal standing by that same ideology.

What does one take away? I can only speak from my own personal experience.

I routinely use Wikipedia to check concepts that I come across online. If I know nothing about them, I look them up. At the very least, Wikipedia will tell me something that I did not know before. Of course, I don't know for sure that what I am told is absolutely correct, but at least I have moved on from total ignorance. I can then formulate a search strategy that is likely to give me further information - perhaps confirmatory, perhaps not.

If, on the other hand, I do have a vague idea about the concept I'm looking up, it acts as a refresher: I can soon gauge whether what I am told is roughly what I understood before. This may be enough, or if not, it may again suggest further avenues for thought.

In other words, Wikipedia is a springboard, in a way that Google is not (and I use Google even more than I use Wikipedia). For me, that's quite enough, and I can only hope that Wikipedia continues to expand to provide even wider coverage. Better, where necessary, can come later.