I love Wikipedia. Though it is not perfect, it is a truly brilliant way of sharing, collaborating on, and discovering information.
In Here Comes the Everybody, Clay Shirky describes this “unmanaged division of labor” as “spontaneous” and continues to write that “Wikipedia is able to aggregate individual and often tiny contributions, hundreds of millions of them annually, made by millions of contributors all performing different functions.” Despite this “spontaneous division of labor,” I believe that we can trust Wikipedia as an beginning research tool. By no means should we end there. The amount of information that is available to us today through search (Google, Yahoo, AOL, etc.) is so large that we are able to look even further than Wikipedia. Additionally, when compared to Britannica, Wikipedia is truly able to measure up. And with costs of time and money factored in, Wikipedia wins hands down.
Part of the beauty of Wikipedia is that it is open to everyone — and I believe it should stay that way. With the exception of a few articles that could be under heated debate, articles should be open to everyone and very rarely ‘locked.’ The entries in Wikipedia follow a power log distribution curve (where few people contribute a lot, and a lot of people contribute a little) which is similar logic to Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail. I believe that if Wikipedia closed itself down to the masses and allowed only verified ‘experts’ to create/edit articles, its popularity would quickly decline leading to an inevitable destruction of the site. Prime example is Nupedia — the original intent of Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, until they stumbled upon what we now call Wikipedia.
I’m not sure how Wikipedia could be better set-up to better provide further accuracy. Already, if an article is vandalized Wikipedians are quick to fix it, Wikipedia staff can put the subject matter on lock down or block a particular user, for repeat offenders, for a little over 1 day, which, they say, seems to work.
