When you start a research paper, you may not be very familiar with your topic. Arguing with a friend about election results in Canada? Or about how many albums Beyonce has released? But is Wikipedia a reliable source for academic information? The English-language Wikipedia has up to a million articles on academic topics.
Wikipedia vs. Traditional Encyclopedias. Wikipedia is written by a large community of many authors. Nearly anyone with an Internet connection can participate. The result is that no article can be attributed to a single author. The editorial team.
Is the editorial board behind a traditional reference work more trustworthy than the editors behind Wikipedia? If an author does not follow these rules, his or her article will be deleted. However, similar to authors, the real names of the editors are also unknown. An article can be edited in a matter of seconds. However, its assertions can also be completely distorted just as quickly.
The text in an online encyclopedia is often easier to read than in a traditional print encyclopedia. According to a paper in the journal Management Science , the median edit length on Wikipedia is just 37 characters, an effort that might take a few seconds.
From there, though, many volunteers are drawn deeper into the site's culture. They discuss their edits on Talk pages; they display their interests and abilities on User pages; some vie to reach the top of the edit-count leaderboard. An elect few become administrators; while around a quarter of a million people edit Wikipedia daily, only around 1, accounts have admin privileges. The site is deep and complex enough—by one count, its policy directives and suggestions run to more than , words—that its most committed adherents must become almost like lawyers, appealing to precedent and arguing their case.
As with the law, there are different schools of interpretation; the two largest of these are deletionists and inclusionists. Deletionists favor quality over quantity, and notability over utility.
Inclusionists are the opposite. Most dedicated editors, whether deletionist or inclusionist, are that category of person who sits somewhere between expert and amateur: the enthusiast. Think of a railfan or a trainspotter. Wikipedians disagree on which is the better term. Their knowledge of trains is quite different from an engineer's or a railway historian's; you can't major in trainspotting or become credentialed as a railfan. But these people are a legitimate kind of expert nonetheless.
Previously, their folk knowledge was reposited in online forums, radio shows, and specialist magazines. Wikipedia harnessed it for the first time. The entry on the famous locomotive the Flying Scotsman is 4, words long and includes eye-wateringly detailed information on its renumbering, series of owners, smoke deflectors, and restoration, from contributors who seem to have the most intimate, hard-won knowledge of the train's working.
Pedantry this powerful is itself a kind of engine, and it is fueled by an enthusiasm that verges on love. Many early critiques of computer-assisted reference works feared a vital human quality would be stripped out in favor of bland fact-speak. But while accuracy binds the trust between reader and contributor, eccentricity and elegance and surprise are the singular qualities that make learning an inviting transaction.
And they are not qualities we associate with committees. Pedants have a reputation for humorlessness, but for Wikipedians a sense of humor is at the core of the good-faith collaboration that defines the project. It is prone to vandalism by fire, and the article centers around an exacting timeline that lists the date of destruction, the method of destruction, and the new security measures put in place every year since Why do Wikipedians perform these millions of hours of labor, some expended on a giant straw goat, without pay?
Because they don't experience them as labor. This is why the meta side of Wikipedia—the Talk pages, the essay commentaries, the policies—is suffused with nerdy jokes. But expressing the directive that way carries a purpose.
Few architects of a world encyclopedia would think to include a forum for jokes, and in the unlikely event that they did, no one could anticipate that it would be important. But on Wikipedia the jokes are very important. They defuse tensions. They foster joyful cooperation. They encourage humility. They promote further reading and further editing. They also represent a surprise return to the earliest days of Enlightenment reference works. If it is a mistake to keep comparing Wikipedia to Britannica , it is another kind of category error to judge Wikipedia against its peers in the internet's top Wikipedia ought to serve as a model for many forms of social endeavor online, but its lessons do not translate readily into the commercial sphere.
It is a noncommercial enterprise, with no investors or shareholders to appease, no financial imperative to grow or die, and no standing to maintain in the arms race to amass data and attain AI supremacy at all costs. At Jimmy Wales' wedding, one of the maids of honor toasted him as the sole internet mogul who wasn't a billionaire.
The site has helped its fellow tech behemoths, though, especially with the march of AI. For free. That means you can use it, adapt it, or share what you find on Wikimedia sites. We do not sell your email address or any of your personal information to third parties. More information about our privacy practices are available at the Wikimedia Foundation privacy policy , donor privacy policy , and data retention guidelines.
Readers verify the facts. Articles are collaboratively created and edited by a community of volunteers using reliable sources , so no single person or company owns a Wikipedia article. The Wikimedia Foundation does not write or edit, but you and everyone you know can help. Projects with no past or existing affiliation with Wikipedia or the Wikimedia Foundation, such as Wikileaks and wikiHow, also use the term.
Although these sites also use "wiki" in their name, they have nothing to do with Wikimedia. We conduct our own research and partner with researchers worldwide to address change in society and technology. Click here to learn more. A leading-edge research firm focused on digital transformation. Good Subscriber Account active since Shortcuts. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often indicates a user profile.
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Jennifer Still. Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia featuring openly editable content created and sourced by users from around the world.
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