An Encyclopedia, such as the
Britannica, is a resource which summarizes sourced material on a topic to present an overview accessible to the general public. The most recent edition of the Britannica contains 700 articles covered in a great deal of depth with named contributors and identified sources, and 65,000 articles covered less extensively with the vast majority (97%) containing less than 750 words, no listed contributors, and no references.
For contrast,
Wikipedia, the "online encylopedia that anyone can edit", has over two million articles as of the writing of this blog. 1,773 have been promoted to "Featured" status: meaning that they been reviewed by the community, and confirmed to be accurate, well-referenced, and readable. An additional 3,234 articles have been identified as "good", meaning that they're reasonably well-referenced, accurate, and readable, but not at the point of an ideal article yet. In total, out of the vast mass of user-generated content Wikipedia has about 5,007 articles that they trust, about 1 in 420. To put this in perspective, the Britannica has around 2,650 articles with any sources at all.
Wikipedia is basically a giant community that edits, summarizes, and compiles information together from other sources. It's not a research community in the purely scientific sense of uncovering new knowledge—the question always arises why you should trust some random person on the internet to to give you good information. The answer is, of course, that you shouldn't. If that person wants their information to stick in the article, they have to provide a trustworthy source for it, so the ideal article is simply an accurate representation of all the information you could find elsewhere. It's not a perfect system, there are topics on which objectivity is hard to establish relating to politics and religion, and sometimes articles are reduced to simply explaining the various viewpoints or having a "Criticism" section to compile dissenting opinions. And while articles are ideally always improving and gaining in useful information and sources there is occasional vandalism, and most articles aren't at the point where all their information can be confirmed elsewhere.
That said, it's a very useful tool due to the extent to which articles are connected—you can click any highlighted word in an article to instantly view an article on that topic, allowing you to investigate all the related information you would need to understand something. And its most impressive feature is its breadth: anything that anyone on the internet finds particularly notable and is easily researched is likely to have an article, and a lot of early articles start out simply as collections of facts and trivia that random people on the web found interesting, and these gradually evolve into a more structured discussion of the topic. It's everything the internet should be, useful information without massive redundancy/inaccuracy, and not written wholly out of bias.
From the sheer volume of information contained in Wikipedia, it's obvious that it's not a typical Encyclopedia. Rather than restricting itself for the sake of space and time to writing articles on the most important scientific and historical topics, it's filled up with information on anything people today realistically care about. There are articles on every episode from the TV show
House, every significant video game release, and articles describing in depth the plots and characters from all sorts of fantasy worlds. In addition to the serious stuff, it's the greatest repository for fictional and pop culture trivia that the world has ever seen.
Some people bemoan the signal to noise ratio and the fact that we apparently have a much better understanding of Tolkien's Middle-Earth than of India, but I don't think exhaustively researched non-academic subjects are a serious problem. Hard-drive space is trivially cheap, and limitations of space and the concerns about the percentage of content devoted to a particular topic simply don't apply to an online Encyclopedia. Any topic covered deserves the best treatment it can get, and if a large number of people feel most qualified and interested in developing their areas of interest over the broader fount of human knowledge, it does not harm anyone else.
The reason why I've chosen to write this (thus far generally supportive) rant, is because of a trend in the recent policy of Wikipedia to treat strictly fictional articles as non-notable, attempting to apply stricter "traditional encyclopedia" rules for content. Previously Wikipedia had contained an article on each "Pokemon" from the Nintendo series, with its own article describing it in relation to its fictional universe and the real world. A few of these articles had even been featured and showcased on the front page of Wikipedia as an example of the finest work the editors had produced. A process is currently underway to delete most of these articles and summarize them all in a list, believing that level of detail to be inappropriate for a feature of a fictional universe.
One possible criteria for notability is to say that it has to have crossed over into real-world media sources to deserve an article, so that there's an objective source to gather information from. Obviously, every person creating an article on themselves would simply be ridiculous, but restricting fictional articles to require independent media sources rather than its own primary source material (Tolkein's Lord of the Rings books serving as a source for Middle Earth, for example), puts Wikipedia in the position of constantly playing catch-up to real world media. In one example, a video blog by a youtube user, lonelygirl15, had its article initially deleted on Wikipedia for being non-notable despite having hundreds of thousands of viewers. It was only after the phenomenon began to catch the notice of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, was featured on the cover of Wired Magazine, made an appearance on Jay Leno, and had the actress herself hired by the United Nations to do a commercial that it was re-assessed and undeleted. In my opinion, it should never have been scrapped in the first place: there was enough verifiable information there for a real article, and a necessarily incomplete or even poorly sourced article is generally better than none at all.
Other recent deletion crusades include attempts to clear out articles based upon TV shows, elements of fictional universes, and webcomics. While the point is often made that the information can always be moved somewhere else, to follow these policies all the way through would mean that Wikipedia would have to give up its status as the Encyclopedia where you can look up absolutely anything. Without the breadth of topics that Wikipedia offers and its current status as the single best place to find online information, it'll simply be a Britannica written by laymen. Encyclopedias which try to cover only the most important areas of human knowledge have been useful tools for the last few hundred years. But Wikipedia has the potential to be much more besides.
Labels: encyclopedias, internet, wikipedia