Memo 7: Wikipedia, Friend or Foe?

How many of us, can contest not to have used or indirectly referenced material from Wikipedia? I doubt that there would many affirmatives on that account, and I believe the reason for that is really, really simple.

Firstly, a quick check on the various sources on the internet that provide insight on whether they view Wikipedia as a credible source will quickly elicit two major points. First, that most people find the material, fairly credible, and that is mostly derived through the fact that most people who have used material from Wikipedia have not really found themselves short on the reliability of the referenced material. The second point is that the general concensus on Wikipedia, is that it is a good source so long as we throw caution to the wind or word, so as to speak.

Wikipedia, is the first generation of open source content distribution, that decentralises information sources. Some journals revere it as an incredible manifestation of the world's knowledgeable open source community that exist out there, while others prefer to compare apples with apples with respect to established and more credible "encyclopedias", implying that Wikipedia can hardly be classified as an encyclopedia. Some food for thought; what exactly are the attributes of a credible source? Or more fundamentally, what exactly are the metrics of credibility? Why are peer-reviewed articles, less credible than "expert" reviews, when statistically the general concencus suggests otherwise? Who are we to blow the whistle on someone citing information from a particular source?

Well without getting too philosophical about the whole issue, I'd start by saying, Wikipedia, with just over 1.5 million english articles, is free and provides enough credibility for it to become the next website with the most number of hits, following in the footsteps of Google, which specialises specifically in Web related searches of pages, pictures and video. Wikipedia, of course specialises in knowledge, the collective knoweledge of the online community that represents a vociferous scourge to the traditional Encyclopedia publishers, whos effort translates, or is forced to translate to dollars. So if we hear an outcry about credibility, it just may be that the outcry sources are from the Encyclopedia camp. Frankly, I don't believe that anybody other than the original inventor/creator has rights to the knowledge that exists out there. So for an encyclopedia publisher to hold legal issues with Wikipedia, is completely out of the question. So if the information is equivalent, then I believe neither factions have the right to dipuste others ownership of material. To conclude that thought, I would feel indifferent about choosing from either of the two sources, and in most cases most research efforts validate the information they gather through a process of cross referencing.

Another important point, that a collegue of mine, Mr. Shashank Jagannath recently made on his blog [1], was whether revenue focused products, outweigh interest based ones, in terms of quality, and how the development of these respective products is observed to be at different stages in its growth. The core of this argument, can be extended to explain whether Open office is better than Microsoft Word, or vice versa, and can still be furthered to determine which will eventually be the better product? In any case, the fact that one is for free makes it a far more attractive option. One business model suggests that the internals of the organisation must be in sync to continue to make profit, whereas the other requires only that the contributors provide quality submissions to form the product as it goes out into the world as a working product at absolutely no cost.




References
1. Mr. P