Wikipedia, a true encyclopedia ?

Dear all,

while browsing through the Internet webpages, I am usre that you have surely come across the famous Wikipedia site. It presents itself like an Encyclopedia and you can definitely find there a wealth of information. One important point is that it is somewhat related to the GNU type of approach to knowledge. Having done a PhD in one the best computer science research centre of the world (the INRIA in France) and being a LINUX user to do my calculations, my robot programmes and my paper edition, I learned that these Open Source type od apporach were closer to an ideal: the one of freely available knowledge and culture. After all, this is what University is all about, isn't it ? Anyway, this was the ideal of the Dominicans who participated in the foundation of the Paris La Sorbonne University on the "rive gauche" in order to remain as free as it was possible for the XIII Century (away from the Archbishop's power).

Then,  the idea of having a free or open zone for contributing to knowledge becomes very appealing. Freedom at its best and still available freely to all. Anyone can bring about his knowledge and have everyone to benefit from it. Anyway, it works well for the Computer Science field and it is easy to assume thta it will be for general knowledge and the dissimination of information.

Lets investigate things further.

The fact that anyone can contribute is insuring that anyone with knowledge can release it, you then do not to go throught the difficult process to be published in either a scientific journal or book. This is not accessible to the first circle of either rich people or academics.

On the other hand, this means that anyone can write almost anything. This raises the issue of information quality or even the question of thruth. Long ago, I have already noticed that you could find a lot errors in books, then one should be carefull about information being correct. How can you acheive verification ? This is even more difficult in an area where anyone can write what he wishes.

Wikipedia tried to solve that problem by asking the people to write information and link it with a source which can be used for verification. This looks find but I have seen many comments that were not holding objectivity (even when it came from some important book which sometimes hold as much propaganda than information). Full objectivity is impossible and therefore we have to admit there is always polititics in the background.

To cope with objectivity, one way is to insure democracy. Wikipedia proposes to build projects where several people become the chest keepers of the information on a subject. Again, my experience proves that there is not enough people to insure objectivity and they become a controlling nucleus, a little bit like the Nomenclatura used to work in the Soviet Union. If they do not like what you have proposed, they reject it and just remove it from Wikipedia.

It is easy to see that Wikipedia is not a proper Encyclopedia and therefore, I do not accept it as a proper source for information when my students are writing reports.

So, I still use Wikipedia as a starting point to very rapidly fetch information which I can then verify later with serious sources like real Dictionnaries or Encyclopeadias (Universalis or Britannica) or even the good old textbooks from ackowledge experts.

LHR