Wikipedia Comes of Age

Chronicle of Higher Education
“It seems like a lifetime ago when I would stop into a Barnes and Noble to look up a fact in one of the books in the reference section …”

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Moderator's note: Some of the discussion of this article (and similar ones) was moved to this thread, and at least two other threads also discuss various issues related to the media's treatment of Wikipedia's tenth anniversary.

6. Jon Awbrey • 09 Jan 2011 @ 05:22 pm

It seems like a lifetime ago when I spent an entire week searching the Internet to track down the university library that would be so kind as to mail me a hard copy of a decade-old commencement address, all so that the authors for whom I was copy-editing would be qualified to certify “with copy in hand” the page number of a quotation they wanted to use. Their publisher would accept nothing less, and rightly so. I have reason to believe that comparable standards of scholarship still reign in many circles.

Looking back, the main influence of Wikipedia has been to lower the standards of journalism and scholarship in every circle where its influence prevails — all save pub-betting, of course, or any court where hard cash is king — to the point where Wikipediot Ways of “reporting” and “researching” have actually begun to seem “normal” to many who once lived by far better norms.

That is occasion for dismay, at least, among those who know what's at stake.

37. Jon Awbrey • 21 Jan 2011 @ 11:36 am

Martinptilvane,

Allow me to repeat something I have said a few times elsewhere:

“In its impact on the ecology of knowledge, Wikipedia amounts to a non-sustainable exploitation of cultural resources.

“Wikipedia is analogous to a multinational timber conglomerate that clear-cuts living forests to crank out its lumber and its pulp, with no understanding of the living system that it sucks on like a destructive parasite.”

Now, the thing that every generation ought to be thinking about is this: What are you going to do when those Authoritative, Respected, Trustworthy Sources (ARTS) are gone, or darn near impossible to find outside of an ARTS museum? Sure, you say, we'll just put that whole darn ARTS museum online, but who will have the skill and who will you trust to curate it?