The Thing With Wikipedia
By Daniel Miessler on December 18th, 2005: Tagged as Culture | Musings
The problem with pointing out stories like the reporter turned Kennedy assassin as proof that Wikipedia is trash is that it doesn’t take into account what’s good about it.
So what if 1 out of 1000 entries have some sort of error in them? You have to think about what kind of errors those are likely to be, and what most people are using Wikipedia for. I find it hard to believe that it’s doing even 1/10 the evil that it’s doing good.
What’s the worst case scenario? Some high-school student makes a crazy claim in a report for school that was spawned by a Wikipedia article? Big deal. Lesson learned. The next 1000 times that student goes to Wikipedia they’ll likely get great information. And don’t say it could be a college student or someone making life or death decisions; anyone in that role should know what Wikipedia is, i.e. what makes it great (hence what its weaknesses are).
The upshot is this — Wikipedia, when used properly, is an incredible asset. It’s sort of like Open Source software — sure, you can have a few bad apples that cause a temporary disturbance, but overall the beauty and power of the system is too great to ignore.