RE: Wikipedia?

[David Goodman <dgoodman@Princeton.EDU>]

The comparison is not Wikipedia vis-a-vis professional reference 
books; the comparison is Wikipedia vis-a-vis the entire 
searchable web--and the superiority of WP filtering in areas of 
interest to its users are obvious. Some traditional academic 
areas are not covered well in either.

Another comparison is Wikipedia vs that part of a library's 
collection that is available online, which is all that many users 
will now see, and yet a third is the comparison of Wikipedia to 
what is available online to the user who is affiliated with a 
small college or without academic affiliation.

Obviously no one would use Wikipedia is most areas as the key 
reference source, but for anyone with interest in unexpected 
areas there is a surprising amount which can not be readily found 
otherwise.

I would not rely on Wikipedia for fact checking as the ultimate 
reference, but an inspection of the history of any article will 
show the advantage in having multiple fact-checkers. Not just 
Wikipedia , but wikis in general are probably the way to gather 
information from widespread contributors.

Beginners might want to try 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Technology or 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:List_of_portals#Arts_and_Culture. 
and try some things.

Even more interesting, try some of the foreign language 
versions--some articles are just crude translations, but by no 
means all. I particularly recommend the German one, 
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauptseite. In some areas, it bears 
the same relation to the English one as traditional German 
academic reference books did to those in English 70 years ago.

David Goodman, Ph.D., M.L.S.
previously:
dgoodman@princeton.edu