Wikipedia: Friend or Foe?
Joseph Reagle
Michael Gorman on Wikipedia (2007)
[Wikipedians] continue to add to, and the intellectually lazy to use, the fundamentally flawed resource, much to the chagrin of many professors and schoolteachers. Many professors have forbidden its use in papers. A professor who encourages the use of Wikipedia is the intellectual equivalent of a dietician who recommends a steady diet of Big Macs with everything. (Gorman 2007)
Reference works can embody and provoke larger social anxieties.
Jacques Barzun on Webster’s 3rd (1963)
Webster’s Third … is thus representation between covers of a cultural revolution. From its tendentious title – the work being neither Webster’s nor international, and only now and then a dictionary – to its silly systems and petty pedantries, the book is a faithful record of our emotional weaknesses and intellectual disarray…. Meanwhile the book belongs in every “culitvated” reader’s library of humor. I did not read every page, but at least once in every page that I read I laughed. (Barzun 1963, “The scholar cornered”, p. 181)
Reference work controversies
… result from a presumption of normative force.
But this is in part a material constraint and a market construct.
Wikipedia is without material constraints so it documents most everything.
Wikipedia’s Critics
In Good Faith Collaboration I organize discourse on Wikipedia as “friend are foe” via four themes:
- collaborative practice: how we work together
- universal vision: the vision of greater access and goodwill
- encyclopedic impulse: the obsessive character of compilers
- technological inspiration: concerns on authority and knowledge
Technology: Rip, Mix, Burn
The Liquid Library
The real magic … [is] as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages At the same time, once digitized, books can be unraveled into single pages or be reduced further, into snippets of a page. These snippets will be remixed into reordered books and virtual bookshelves. (Kelly 2006)
Gorman’s criticism
The books in great libraries are much more than the sum of their parts.” A snippet of information might be useful from Page 142, but knowledge requires an understanding of Pages 1-141 “or the text was not worth writing and publishing in the first place” (Gorman 2004)
We see a concern over the integrity of knowledge and sanctity of the author.
There is also a generational gap of insecurity.
Douglas Adams 1999 wrote “How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet”:
- everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
- anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
- anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.
Should students use Wikipedia in their assignments?
Students should use Wikipedia as part of an assignment.
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