Comments on: When Is Wikipedia A Legitimate Reference?

By: » Doctor Recommended

» Doctor Recommended — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 20:45:28 +0000

[...] my windy discussion on Wikipedia comes a sweet surprise: various court cases have cited entries found within Wikipedia [...]

By: Tim

Tim — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 18:31:22 +0000

DJC said:The only thing I can think of regarding Wikipedia is that if you cite it, the reader cannot go and read the specific instance of the article you intended because it may have been over written. With Britannica or other physical encyclopedias if you reference a specific year of publication the information may be no better than Wikipedia but it is at least consistent. Just a thought. That's a good point. I know they're working on a print and CDRom edition of Wikipedia, but that is definitely an advantage Britannica does have. If you do use the "citation" feature built into wiki, it does link to the specific edit up at that moment based on a unique ID number. These numbers change every time it is edited... so unfortunately only readers and editors that know this will understand why the entry may have changed (the citaiton feature is on the left side, the George Bush entry is always a fun one to look around with).

By: Vince Daliessio

Vince Daliessio — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 15:35:00 +0000

Oh, and I want to stress that uber-physicist Richard Feynman pointed out the fatal INSTITUTIONAL flaws of the Space Shuttle program after the Challenger disaster, in addition to the proximate cause – faulty O-ring – that the media fixated on;

http://www.libertyguys.org/home/detail.asp?ArtID=715

By: Vince Daliessio

Vince Daliessio — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 15:07:16 +0000

TCS Daily (exposed a while ago as a mouthpiece of the Republican Party) recently skewered Wikipedia by claiming it was open to bias and ignorance as well as vandalism. I’d just like to point out that this complaint is: a) just as valid against Britannica, peer-reviewed journals, and general-interest periodicals; b) a result of its own (TCS) institutional biases(they – the politicians – have an active interest in ‘official’ histories and definitions of everything and wikistyle references beyond their institutional control really scare and anger them), and; c)laziness on the part of the writer – if you know an entry is defective, fix it yourself!

When Tom DiLorenzo posted a complaint on the LRC blog about a defective entry (social democracy), I simply went over and set it straight, adding to the critique of it from the right that the Austrians view the current regime of the west as a corporatist, not a capitalist system, inserted the appropriate links to entries on Mises, Rothbard, Hayek, and LvMI, and emailed it to Tom. Try THAT with a Britannica entry!

Incidentally, I use the Googlepedia extension for Firefox that displays the relevant Wikipedia entry next to the results – for looking up chemicals it is not always THE definitive entry, but the whole thing helps me to make decisions that normally require a much slower hunting through paper resources. Long Live Wikipedia!

By: DJC

DJC — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 14:21:28 +0000

The only thing I can think of regarding Wikipedia is that if you cite it, the reader cannot go and read the specific instance of the article you intended because it may have been over written. With Britannica or other physical encyclopedias if you reference a specific year of publication the information may be no better than Wikipedia but it is at least consistent.

Just a thought.