Jon Frater

This got a mention in this week’s ResourceShelf Newsletter:

"Wikipedia, an Internet encyclopedia written entirely by volunteers,
claimed that a prominent journalist might have been involved in the
assassinations of the Kennedy brothers, a false charge that has highlighted the
Achilles’ heel of such do-it-yourself Web sites.

The journalist, John Seigenthaler Sr., 78  —  who was an administrative
assistant to Robert Kennedy as well as one of his pallbearers  —  wrote an
op-ed piece in USA Today last week protesting the "false, malicious" story. 

"Wikipedia is a flawed and irresponsible research tool," Seigenthaler
wrote. 

Wikipedia removed the allegation in early October, more than four months
after it was first posted."

Read the entire article here, but I think the point has been effectively made.

A bit of disclosure here: I have a Wikipedia account, and I think it’s one of the niftiest online collaborative efforts ever. (Another one is here. Yet another is here. And one more is here. And yes, I have accounts with all these, too.) Having said this, let me say here and now that Wikipedia is not a primary research tool.

I’ll say that again for you folks in the back: Wikipedia is not a primary research tool! Peer review by accident is not a reliable quality assurance mechanism, IMNSHO. So condemning it outright is missing  the point. It it not "flawed and irresponsible". But it’s not for primary research either.

This will likely get me in trouble with at least a few folks who swear by all thinks wiki, but here’s the way I see it: it’s true that by making this resource essentially open for literally anybody with an account (which really means anybody who can be bothered to sign up for one) can make any changes they want more or less at will. Granted, there is a quality assurance system in place, but like any kind of decentralized resource, it’s not very good at catching mistakes as they happen. Someone needs to alert the upper echelons of editors that something drastic has happened and they’ll get to it when they get to it. That’s one problem. And I think it’s an inevitable one, too: when breadth of authorship increases, the average level of quality decreases. That’s just how it works; it’s a law every bit as immutable as "Time equals Money" or "E=MC^2". As people who are dedicated to providing our clients with consistently reliable information, we can’t ignore this.

The flip side of this is obvious: nowhere will you find a more interesting research tool. When you put a few million sufficiently motivated individuals together and tell them (beg them) to write as much as they want on any topic of interest they may have, you get an amazing variety of ideas, experience, opinion, and the methods of thought that goes with them. That cannot be denied, either. That variety is responsible for making Wikipedia as nifty a resource tool to work with as it is.

I’m not bashing Wikipedia or  wiki type projects. Distributed Proofreaders is a wiki type project as well, but their level of quality control is much higher because they’re dealing with primary manuscripts and so on. There’s room for interpretation, but there’s no room for interpreting a passage’s meaning into something that does not appear on the page. There’s a real requirement that the proofed text conform to the original as closely as possible. Not to mention there’s a higher average level of scholarship practiced by the folks who contribute to it (that’s merely an opinion but that’s how it seems to me.)

If I were advising a student who wanted to use an article he found on Wikipedia as his primary source, I’d tell him not to. I’d let him know that Wikipedia is a great source of leads for additional research, but I wouldn’t accept it as a primary source on anything. (Which doesn’t change the fact that I consult the site on a regular basis for all kinds of things.)

But boy, is it fun to read.

Update: The journal Nature has produced a study that says that Wikipedia is only a bit less accurate than the Encyclopedia Britannica. And Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales talks to BusinessWeek about the steps being taken to prevent fraudulent entries in the future.

Another Update: What the Media Can’t Get Right About Wikipedia .

After looking over the past bits and pieces I’ve posted about Google, I can imagine if you’re reading this, you’re probably thinking, "Oy, not another one!" And you’d be right to a certain point. Then again, this may bear repeating often.

What brought me to this conclusion was an email from the head of IT here suggesting that we download Google Desktop and install it on our PCs at work. Not a bad suggestion on the face of it: Google Desktop, from everything I’ve heard about it (and having never tried it myself) is an amazing resource that helps track literally as many files on your computer’s hard drive as you can create. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. But something in me just doesn’t feel . . . right . . . about letting Google into my workplace in quite as intimate a manner as that.

This came on the heels of this article from Sara Lacy at BusinessWeek, titled "Analyzing Google’s Analytic Strategy", which suggested that Google may now be in the pole position of online searching compared to relative newcomers (newercomers?) like Microsoft. Remember about ten years ago when Microsoft was the big dog of the online HTML browser wars? They were doing whatever it took to gain predominance over the competition, and now, while some of us would defend our use of Firefox and Opera with our lives (or at least our online habits), nobody really disputed the fact that most professional programmers code their HTML for Internet Explorer first and other browsers second, if at all.

Google, with it’s $400 per share stock price and its stated intention to digitize the living heck out of some of the biggest library collections in the U.S., has managed to out-Microsoft Microsoft it seems–or it intends to. As the article says:

"By offering a free service — and one that’s tightly integrated with
AdWords [AdWords being those coded paid ads that run alongside the search results–JF] — Google is almost the de facto standard. This approach also
helps it build up a disparate base of small companies for its local
search efforts — which many consider the next frontier of search, one where Google will have to compete hard with Yahoo and MSN."

So I freely admit to being conflicted about this: the librarian (and the nerd inside the librarian) in me is really excited about the prospect that all the information on the planet (or inside hard drives which is increasingly all the info available to anyone with an internet connection) might eventually be searchable to one extend or another by having Google Desktop index the files on your PC’s hard drive and linking up all those indexes with Google’s search index. (No, I’m not suggesting this is Google’s ultimate goal, I’m just pointing out the possibility.) On the other hand, that same prospect gives me the Herbie-jibes because that same meta-index can be used to create sales techniques for literally every product and/or service imaginable which could create an  online environment intrusive enough to make the fifty-seven spam ads  for breast and penis enlargement products I receive every single day seem like nothing.

We shall see. In the meantime, the grant writing for this year is finished, we’re crossing our fingers hoping the money will come, and I’m not installing Google Desktop.