Wikipedia: Fact, Fiction, or Useful Clues?

Steven Cohen quotes Simon who runs the Valis blog, on the wikipedia, a resource I use a lot.

“Anyway, I've been very interested in some of the social tools I've been playing with recently. I made my first contribution to Wikipedia a few days ago. What's interesting to me is the whole notion of group accountability. The traditional approach to creating and organising knowledge assumes that this should be the task of experts - and this is what we're taught in library school - when we evaluate resources we look to the credibility of the author/editor/publisher. Now Wikipedia challenges that - it's not "organised", and contributions are made by anonymous posters, who could be anybody. Yet it works. Sure, anyone could edit a record to reflect a partisan agenda, or as a prank. But dozens of other people would correct it. A self-correcting system.”

The wikipedia is great but I think the level of fact checking needs to be acknowledged. I often see the source for a wikipedia entry when I search on a topic, especially when I have been looking at people like musicians. The wikipedia entry is simply pasted from another source but you do not know this source. For this reason, the wikipedia information should be seen as clues that need to be verified.

I discovered this in doing family history research where hundreds of family web sites would repeat the same unsubstantiated information until it became an accepted “fact.” I challenged some people on “facts” that had no primary source and they had become true believers because these “facts” were “well known.” The real genealogy researchers see the information on the web sites as simply clues that need to be verified, still useful in that context. While I think the wikipedia information is much more reliable than genealogy web sites, I still think the same can be said for the wikipedia. Unless there is primary references sources that can be checked, I would see the wikipedia as useful clues but not necessarily facts.