The Citizendium and Wikipedia are not reference works
I know this is going to sound weird, but I am inclined to think that the Citizendium and Wikipedia are not properly considered reference works, not according to the traditional conception. I say this not because they can’t be used as reference works, nor because they are not reliable (that’s not the issue I’m interested in here).
It’s just that, by some traditional conception of “reference work,” they don’t seem to fit the conception. A reference work aims at supplementing research work by supplying simple background definitions and facts. The traditional notion of a reference work was to supply enough information that you would need to read scholarly material in the area. But WP and CZ are aimed not just at supplying background definitions, or just summing up the basics: they aren’t constrained by such notions at all. They are actually aimed at laying out as much of the knowledge itself as possible, whether it is “background” or not. They actually extend (or in time will extend) beyond the coverage of the “companions” put out by Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press.
If this is right, then the more specialized articles of the Citizendium will not be just background information for the more serious papers. They will be contain summaries of the serious papers themselves. We’ll still be a secondary source, but unlike almost all secondary sources except literature reviews, we will be detailed to a level of the source papers themselves. And that, I’m claiming, is not the function of a reference work.
It’s a “knowledge work” itself, of a brand new sort, possible for the first time in the age of the collaborative Internet.
[…] different that it is, perhaps, best not to describe the Citizendium as a reference work at all, but instead as a “knowledge work.” Individuals, no matter how brilliant, are hard pressed to do as good a job as can be done in the […]
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