Monday, October 28, 2013

Wikipedia: is there cause for concern?

MIT Technology Review recently published the article "The Decline of Wikipedia" by Tom Simonite.  The article begins "The sixth most widely used website in the world is not run anything like the others in the top 10. It is not operated by a sophisticated corporation but by a leaderless collection of volunteers who generally work under pseudonyms and habitually bicker with each other. It rarely tries new things in the hope of luring visitors; in fact, it has changed little in a decade"....

This article should be of interest to those of us who use Wikipedia which is most of us.  It is a good overview of how Wikipedia came into being, current problems with the site and the reliance on Wikipedia by services such as Ask.com and SIRI.

Go ahead and use Wikipedia but be aware of the drawbacks. Generally recommend that lawyers do not cite to Wikipedia. 

Ernster, the Virtual Library Cat

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