When I was a kid, we had a set of Encyclopedia Britannica. (Copyright 1960, as I recall.) I remember hours spent occasionally leafing through the volumes. Sometimes I intently looked for specific information, and at other times I just randomly flipped through, looking at stuff that caught my eye.
With the advent of the internet has come Wikipedia. I find myself using it just like I used those old Britannica volumes. Well, the Christian Science Monitor has a good article about Wikipedia today and it turns out that Wikipedia is close to Britannica in accuracy. Here are a couple of paragraphs from George Lamb's article Online Wikipedia is not Britannica – but it's close.
The lofty goal of Wikipedia, whose contributors and editors are volunteers, is to provide a free encyclopedia to everyone on the planet, written in their native language. The website currently claims about 2.5 million entries (nearly 1 million in English), on almost every subject imaginable in more than 100 languages. Wikipedia ranked as the 26th busiest site on the Internet Jan. 1, and the 34th busiest over the last three months, according to alexa.com, a Web-search subsidiary of Amazon.com. And its page views and site traffic have continued to climb in the month since the controversy began.
…..
"I don't think there's going to be any jump in the number [of open wikis], says Steve Jones, a professor of communications at the University of Illinois in Chicago. For him, the lesson of Wikipedia is an old one: Don't believe everything you read online, no matter where you read it. "We seem to be learning [that lesson] over and over again," he says.
That's something with which Wales would probably agree. Wikipedia is only a starting point, he says. If you're planning to do brain surgery, he says, "I'd recommend medical school. But if you're just trying to find out some background information, then, by and large, [Wikipedia is] generally pretty good."
Leave a Reply