an article in the Idaho Librarian by Alex Kyrios
Introduction
Baga, Hoover, and Wolverton recently assembled a “webliography” of free online resources for catalogers (Baga, Hoover, & Wolverton, 2013). The webliography is itself a very helpful resource, especially for institutions short on personnel, money, or both. But the authors neglected to mention a prominent source for cataloging tasks such as classification and authority control, as well as help for other library professionals, from reference librarians to resource selectors. Like those listed by Braga et al., this source is free online.
That resource is Wikipedia.
Wikipedia has been a fixture of the internet for years now. The site was formally launched on January 15, 2001. It came to prominence some years later and is, as of April 19, 2013, the sixth most popular website on the internet according to Alexa.com. (While Wikipedia is a multilingual project, with 286 languages represented as of April 19, 2013, this study will only examine the English Wikipedia, the largest and oldest version.) Perhaps the best known aspect of Wikipedia is its openness. Generally speaking, anyone may contribute to its encyclopedic articles by adding or removing anything. This fact colors most people’s judgments of the site. If you believe in the virtues of “crowdsourcing,” you’re likely to see Wikipedia as one of humanity’s most impressive knowledge-organizing ventures. But if you’re skeptical of crowd wisdom, you’re more likely to see the project as an impressive sandcastle on a beach, just waiting for a malicious child or the tides to destroy it. It would be wrong to discount the dangers Wikipedia’s open model represents. In most cases, there’s nothing stopping a person from adding false information (or deleting legitimate information) from an article, so taking anything on Wikipedia at face value is ill-advised. But it would equally be wrong to discount the legitimacy and utility of Wikipedia on such grounds.
It’s no wonder librarians can be skeptical of Wikipedia. At first glance, its mission seems incompatible with ours. Even as librarians make active efforts to engage users, such as through demand-driven acquisitions, the library remains a largely top-down model. Bibliographic experts select the best resources to make available to their users. No one would assert that every library resource is of unimpeachable reliability, but ideally, at least, every library book has an invisible seal of approval, an indication that the book is useful and good in some sense. (This can range from obvious quality educational materials, such as Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, to popular leisure reading like the latest John Grisham novel, to primary source documents whose educational value is quite removed from its actual message, such as Mein Kampf.) But Wikipedia appears to have no such filters. In a system without the sort of filters that have served libraries so well, the reliability of information seems compromised. One popular writer has dismissed Wikipedia by summing up its philosophy as “Experts are scum” (Sjöberg, 2006). But this reflects a fundamental understanding of how Wikipedia works, even if it is one that many librarians may share. Used properly, Wikipedia can be a powerful tool for librarians of all types. And a librarian who knows how to make the most of Wikipedia can be a great resource for users of any library.
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