The Future of Wikipedia
One of the conversations that has been floating around the web lately, was mentioned yesterday on The Chroncile. Apparently the financial future of Wikipedia is less than guaranteed. While I think this is probably a case of Wikipedia trying to raise its giving profile, I am drawn to the end quote in the Chronicle article.
Paul McNamara of Network World assesses the situation bluntly: “When you think about the impact that Wikipedia has had upon our society — not all of it good, certainly — it’s astounding that the organization tasked with keeping it afloat has to resort to bake sales and begging.” –Brock Read
It seems to me that Wikipedia is a tremendous social resource, and that academia might want to become more invested in its well being. On a simple level this might mean Universities could donate money to help keep it afloat, why not is would be much more cost effective than paying for a subscription to Britannica Online. On a more radical level it might mean that Universities become invested in the content of Wikipedia. That is what if professors took time to update, manage, watch and contribute to Wikipedia, becoming a public intellectual, and at my most radical, what if you could put this on your CV and/or tenure review?
February 14th, 2007 at 1:17 am
I couldn’t agree more.
Many in academia have had some sort of knee-jerk adverse reaction to wikipedia, many without really using it I might add, but it is a tremendous resource. When you need to just know a bit about something, wikipedia is one of the most accessable and informative places to look - I’d not use it for a paper, but when I’m reading a philosopher and need to know a little about what he just alluded to, wikipedia is a great place to go. Or if I want to know about a tv show, or an author, or just about anything else.
I’m going to go contribute a few bucks right now. Poor college student or not, it is something I use almost daily.
February 14th, 2007 at 3:03 pm
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February 14th, 2007 at 4:23 pm
I have to agree with you as well. I’m currently teaching two sections of Freshman Composition focusing exclusively on research writing and Wikipedia has come into the conversation on at least two occasions. I agree with Gideon that the resource should not yet be used in formal writing, but it has the potential to become an invaluable resource if academics would take serious interest in its upkeep and content.
As to CV line on the tenure review. I hold out hopes that isn’t too far in the future. We’re already having to seriously reconsider what we call ‘documents’ and ‘text’ and scholars like Jerome McGann and David Levy have already commented on the changing nature of the humanities in relation to digital texts. I’m in the process of searching for Ph.D. programs at the moment and the university’s willingness to seriously consider digital humanities will factor into my final decision.
February 24th, 2007 at 3:02 am
I’m a bit less optimistic about the academy moving to support Wikipedia in any substantial way, mostly because I’m at an institution where a department has just banned the site in a really myopic way with very few faculty speaking out against the policy. I’ve blogged about the issue and my own take on academic uses of Wikipedia here.
March 1st, 2007 at 8:44 pm
I think people who criticize Wikipedia are totally incompetent and should have their degrees taken away. I use Wikipedia and I notice that 99.9% of the articles are correct and written really well. So these fools in universities just don’t like a little competition. The people rule the world now and all experts are usually finks anyway so it’s no loss.
April 5th, 2007 at 1:54 am
In my grad program, students in the core course are given the option of writing a Wikipedia article on a topic related to our field in place of a standard short research paper. I should note that within this course, research papers and Wikipedia articles alike are submitted to peer review by two classmates before the final version is turned in. So far, I think the experience has been generally positive, although there have been some negative interactions with other Wikipedia users surrounding controversial subjects. Still, the vast majority of articles contributed have been on missing topics or stubs, which are rampant in our field. One of the biggest sticking points has been getting students to actually post the articles they’ve written — people generally cite the conversion to Wikipedia markup as the hurdle, but I think there’s also some trepidation about displaying work in such a public forum and uncertainty about the the ultimate fate of that work (will I annoy someone? will someone challenge my article? will I have to come back over and over to defend against vandals? etc).