P.C. Shannon

Lorelle posted an article recently called Please Don’t Use Google To Research References, and I agree with most of what she says. I especially like that she sends people to Snopes to debunk e-mail rumors. I’m a fan of replying to forwards about how Bill Gates is going to pay everyone to forward this message with links to that site, which is probably why I don’t get those anymore. Mission accomplished! But I think Lorelle (and her commenters) miss the usefulness of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is great for two reasons, beyond being free: it’s not limited by its media, so it can contain all sorts of very informative articles on any esoteric topic you can think of; and hyperlinks make it very easy to navigate between related articles. For example, after buying holiday stamps the other day, I was trying to figure out why snowflakes have hexagonal symmetry. I went to Wikipedia and searched for “snowflake,” which led me to the articles on snow and then ice. Just a few clicks later, and I had my answer. Even if that information is in the Encyclopedia Britannica, it would have taken much longer to find (even if you factor out the trip to the library), and that represents a significant barrier to satisfying curiosity.

In addition, Encyclopedia Britannica is not the gold standard for information accuracy that everyone seems to think it is. It’s not much better than Wikipedia, at last in terms of science articles, according to a study by the journal Nature:

Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia. But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively.

Commenter Edrei is correct in saying, “The funniest thing is when people start referencing Google or worse, source Wikipedia in their References. Not only is that unprofessional, it’s downright embarrassing in the scientific world.” However, Wikipedia is excellent for sating curiosity, as I said above, and many of the articles provide dead-tree references, so it’s a good starting point for doing serious research. It’s also possible to judge the veracity of an article by looking at its revision history (many many edits are bad) and its discussion page. In the Nature article, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales talks about adding “stable” articles and user ratings, both of which would go a long way towards improving the perception of the online encyclopedia as unreliable at best.