Here is her blog entry reporting her insights from that discussion...
QUOTE(Lindsay Anderson's Blog)
What's wrong with Wikipedia?
The majority of USU professors prohibit their students from using Wikipedia.com, a free online encyclopedia built collaboratively by millions of anonymous individuals, as a source in research papers.
Wikipedia is self proclaimed to be “The biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet. Over seven million articles in over 200 languages, and still growing.â€
So why is a website that is so widely circulated frowned upon as a credible source for papers? The answer to this question can be found at the top of Wikipedia’s main page, which says, “Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.â€
Anyone can edit Wikipedia, or so the website professes, but Barry Kort, a visiting scientist at the MIT Media Lab, is telling a different story.
Kort was banned from editing Wikipedia after he tried to fix an entry on one of his colleagues which was inaccurate.
"Wikipedia doesn't try for accuracy, since the editors are anonymous amateurs,†Kort said. “Instead it tries to make sure that everything comes from a reliable source. But that's not a good basis for accuracy."
Kort said Wikipedia banned him and other academics because they “challenge the baloney that the other people have put up on the site. In my case, the justification was that, quote: I had no interest in writing an encyclopedia.â€
Kort isn’t the only one speaking out against Wikipedia. Wikipedia Review is an online opinion and editorial website, reserved strictly for bashing Wikipedia. Not only are several of the pieces stories like Kort’s, but also pieces that reveal the absurdity of using Wikipedia for anything more than popular culture.
"Wikipedia should declare itself to be what it has in fact become, a good compendium of popular culture," Kort said.
The idea of Wikipedia, or an online collaborative encyclopedia, is a good idea, but the way that Wikipedia allowed absolute anonymity and no credentials, eventually led to its poor quality and inaccuracies.
Kort could use a sock puppet, “a username that no one knows†to continue editing but he says that Wikipedia’s administrators would know the sock puppet was him, and would block him. The only other solution to continued editing would be to become an administrator.
Becoming an administrator for Wikipedia is “like being nominated for a political job; it’s just politics," Kort said.
He said the Wikipedia administrators “are called The Cabal. People who have staked out positions of power there. Like warlords."
Google is working on creating an answer to Wikipedia, Kort said, called Knol. Knol will be very similar to Wikipedia, but scholars and academics will be compensated for the encyclopedic entries they contribute.
In the meantime, there are other, more credible, online encyclopedias, Kort said, "Citizendium has a different plan, so does Scholarpedia."
The majority of USU professors prohibit their students from using Wikipedia.com, a free online encyclopedia built collaboratively by millions of anonymous individuals, as a source in research papers.
Wikipedia is self proclaimed to be “The biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet. Over seven million articles in over 200 languages, and still growing.â€
So why is a website that is so widely circulated frowned upon as a credible source for papers? The answer to this question can be found at the top of Wikipedia’s main page, which says, “Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.â€
Anyone can edit Wikipedia, or so the website professes, but Barry Kort, a visiting scientist at the MIT Media Lab, is telling a different story.
Kort was banned from editing Wikipedia after he tried to fix an entry on one of his colleagues which was inaccurate.
"Wikipedia doesn't try for accuracy, since the editors are anonymous amateurs,†Kort said. “Instead it tries to make sure that everything comes from a reliable source. But that's not a good basis for accuracy."
Kort said Wikipedia banned him and other academics because they “challenge the baloney that the other people have put up on the site. In my case, the justification was that, quote: I had no interest in writing an encyclopedia.â€
Kort isn’t the only one speaking out against Wikipedia. Wikipedia Review is an online opinion and editorial website, reserved strictly for bashing Wikipedia. Not only are several of the pieces stories like Kort’s, but also pieces that reveal the absurdity of using Wikipedia for anything more than popular culture.
"Wikipedia should declare itself to be what it has in fact become, a good compendium of popular culture," Kort said.
The idea of Wikipedia, or an online collaborative encyclopedia, is a good idea, but the way that Wikipedia allowed absolute anonymity and no credentials, eventually led to its poor quality and inaccuracies.
Kort could use a sock puppet, “a username that no one knows†to continue editing but he says that Wikipedia’s administrators would know the sock puppet was him, and would block him. The only other solution to continued editing would be to become an administrator.
Becoming an administrator for Wikipedia is “like being nominated for a political job; it’s just politics," Kort said.
He said the Wikipedia administrators “are called The Cabal. People who have staked out positions of power there. Like warlords."
Google is working on creating an answer to Wikipedia, Kort said, called Knol. Knol will be very similar to Wikipedia, but scholars and academics will be compensated for the encyclopedic entries they contribute.
In the meantime, there are other, more credible, online encyclopedias, Kort said, "Citizendium has a different plan, so does Scholarpedia."