Wikipedia was covered on NPR’s Talk of the Nation back on November 2nd.
via Librarian in Black
Wikipedia, Open Source and the Future of the Web
A new wave of Internet sites, like Wikipedia, invite their users to interact and contribute facts and opinion and edit each other. It’s a more democratic way to present information. But is it more accurate?
Guests:
Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine
Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikimedia Foundation
Nicholas Carr, freelance business and technology writer; former executive editor of The Harvard Business Review; author of the book, Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage
I love A9 as a search engine. Yes, I started using it because I get a discount on my Amazon.com purchases by using their toolbar. It uses Google’s database so I figured why not. What I have come to love about it is the ability to receive search results from multiple sources on a single page. Typically I have it perform a regular text search but also an Web image search and a Flickr search at the same time. I’m not always looking for pictures but the image results I get can sometimes make me think about my search and/or just give me a laugh. Today I got a laugh out of a search for nerd tv. I was just looking for the site’s URL but as the first Web image result I was presented with an image of Tom Baker as the Doctor being menaced by a Cyberman (right). Why this result appeared, I’m pretty sure I’ll never figure out.
At the CAL conference last week I attended one session on the concept of Googlezon. During the conversation one attendee was very anti-Google and even more anti-Wikipedia. She made it clear that her students had searched Google for information on the dangers of microwave ovens and received a lot of false information. (Sites claiming that microwave ovens were dangerous despite all the scientific evidence to the contrary.) Additionally she was very skeptical of the value of Wikipedia since it could be edited by anyone. I started thinking about this some more today and tried a little experiement.
First, I searched Google for microwave danger and received the resutls shown to the right. As the woman said, nearly all of the first ten results are on the supposed dangers. (Those that aren’t deal with microwaves from cell phones and “Unwise Microwave Oven Experiments”.
I then performed the same search in Wikipedia (shown right). Initially I received a list of available pages since there was no page in the system titles “microwave danger”. Both of the first two results sent me to the Wikipedia page titled “Microwave oven”. In the table of contents for this article there is a section on “Controversial hazards: Radiation”. Clicking on that link I get a brief yet, scientifically accurate disussion of the perceived dangers.”
My conclusion: In this case, Wikipedia is much more reliable than Google when it comes to answering the question of the students. Yet, from the comments made during the session, there was going to be ice skating in Hell before that woman was going to point her students to Wikipedia as a reliable source.
I’ve been asked to participate in “Spotlight on Your Career” sponsored by the Colorado Association of Law Libraries and the Rocky Mountain Special Libraries Association in February 2006. I’ll be on a panel “of authors and editors talking about librarians as authors”. Sounds like it’ll be a lot of fun. I’ll post additional detais as I receive them.
National Geographic is reporting that there’s going to be a glass bridge extending out over the Grand Canyon. Artist’s rendering included.
