Judging the Quality of Wikis and Non-vetted Sites

My profession has had a very public and direct opinion about Wikipedia.  Librarians, especially reference and academic librarians have been openly opposed to Wikipedia. Wikipedia’s mission seems to be totally incompatible with that of librarians; as the goal of a librarian is to evaluate the quality of resources, and many question Wikipedia’s quality. The reason for this is mainly due to the credibility of Wikipedia, or lack thereof. Two main things that librarians have a problem with, concerning Wikipedia are: the massive amount of errors on the site, both grammatical and factual. The second reason is that with Wikipedia anyone can contribute to it by adding or removing anything that they want, which colors our judgment of the site. There’s absolutely nothing stopping a person from adding false information or deleting legitimate information from the site which that alone makes it unreliable.  When I teach my classes and do library orientations I strongly discourage students from using the site as a reference and will not accept it as a legitimate source. Librarians consider ourselves as experts in regard to evaluating and recommending top notch scholarly resources. We spend a lot of time and money searching for the best scholarly articles and databases written by scholars and academic leaders, which for the most part does not seem to include Wikipedia. And with the thousands of articles and databases that schools provide, especially colleges it seems reckless to use a source such as Wikipedia.  That’s not to say that every library resource has unimpeachable reliability, but the sources that we pick has been evaluated and generally has the seal of approval, meaning that the book is useful and good in some regard.

With all that being said, all librarians are not as skeptical of Wikipedia as they once were. Since the site was launched in 2001 it has made some major improvements, which greatly increased its credibility and reliability. The fact that Wikipedia is a fixture of the internet now and is said to be in the top ten of the most popular websites on the internet forces me, and librarians in general to give the site a closer glance and perhaps see what we can do as a profession to make it more accurate for our students. Also Wikipedia has made major efforts to make the site more credible. It has implemented many defense mechanisms specifically designed to prevent people from interfering with the sites credibility. One of the other good things about Wikipedia is their use of crowdsourcing; which is their use of gathering information from anyone all over the world. However as of now I and most librarians still see Wikipedia as an unreliable source, mainly because we are skeptical of the crowd’s wisdom whom are providing this information.