Wikipedia

I'm increasingly annoyed with the hype surrounding wikipedia. I am immediately suspicious of any technology people claim will "revolutionize" something, because it usually doesn't. In this respect, wikipedia doesn't disappoint.

First, a wee bit of background. Wikipedia is a democratic encyclopedia. Rather than have annoying "experts" editing the entries, any redneck schmuck can add or edit entries anywhere in the database.

For the most part, it actually works pretty well. Enough people look at the articles to prevent them from being tinfoil hat-crazy most of the time, and no one political group generally can run roughshod over another in any given article.

So what's it good for? Gist. It's great for getting the gist of any given topic. Want to know who the fuck czar Nicholas II was? Check out wikipedia. Want to know what the fuck a kumquat is and why anybody in their right mind would name a fruit that? Flip to wikipedia. It's a great resource for getting a general understanding of something you know jack shit about. In this respect, it is especially good at being a source of information for truly obscure topics. It's a fun exercise to try to find a topic wikipedia _doesn't_ have an entry for.

Which brings me to what's wrong with wikipedia. Or, perhaps more accurately, what people think wikipedia is good for and it isn't. It isn't, never will be, and never should be an authoritative source on anything. Nothing! You hear me? The academic advancement of knowledge depends on being able to rely on the prior work and sources of knowledge it's based on as being objectively correct, verified, and thoroughly scrunized by experts. Wikipedia gives you no such guarantee, and due to its structure, it never can. Wikipedia is a repository for conventional wisdom, but unfortunately conventional wisdom is sometimes wrong, even dangerously wrong.

There's a reason the world has experts, people. It's because they know stuff other people don't. If I don't have a guarantee an article was written by an expert and verified by other experts, it's worthless to me as a basis for other academic work, and the point at which wikipedia adopts that structure is the point at which it becomes just another encyclopedia and loses anything that might have been remarkable about it.

I'm fucking tired of hearing about how the great wikipedia is empowering the everyday joe to overturn the monoliths like Encyclopedia Brittanica. Shut up. All of you. Seriously. Just because something is new and different doesn't automatically mean it's better. Wikipedia can do certain things that traditional encyclopedias can't, but serving as an authoritative source of verified knowledge is not one of them. Get over yourselves.

That said, wikis are a great idea for tech companies to document the development of their products. Everyone in the company is definitionally an expert on the technology they're working on, so you can rely on their contributions to the wiki. Moreover, software is such a dynamic entity anyway that a knowledge repository that can evolve at the same pace as the software development is a godsend.

So go ahead...use wikipedia. But use it intelligently. Use it to figure out where else you should look for more detailed and more accurate information. Just don't, for the love of christ, cite it in a paper. You might as well just stamp the word "retard" on your forehead and be done with it.

(reading over this entry, it kinda sucks, isn't terribly coherent, and isn't terribly funny, but I'm sick and too lazy to rewrite it. Deal.)