Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Wikis

I'm a big fan of Wikipedia and use it all the time.

Within reason though.

The perceived unreliability of wikis is slowly being eroded away now that Wikipedia is using citations. Posting at the start of an article that if needs citations and may need cleaning up informs the user that the information may need checking.

I believe that it is a case of how much trust we put in the source. For many years World Book encyclopedia never made mention in the entry for Hiroshima that an atomic bomb had been dropped. Do we put our absolute faith that every entry in Britannica is correct and non-biased?

As long as you go into wikis with the understanding that you may need to do further research I see absolutely no reason not to use them.

The example I give people is this: you wouldn't use Wikipedia to discover the reasons behind the Iraq War, but it's great if you want to know all the different types of kryptonite.

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