Serendipity35

When I read a post on the Wired Campus Blog called "Encyclopaedia Britannica Goes -- Gasp -- Wiki!" I thought, "Well, it's about time."

If you have followed the Wikipedia controversy and its battles of words with traditional encyclopedia publishers, you know that those publishers have been hoping that Wikipedia would be discredited, turn out to be a fad, and just go away. But that didn't happen.

In the 7 years since Wikipedia launched, its popularity has only continued to grow. I have seen more students turn to it (for the right and the wrong reasons) and many serious educators begin to include it as part of their lessons - including lessons on information literacy, judging the validity of sources, recognizing bias and other issues.

At lunch, someone asked if I had heard that NBC News journalist Tim Russert had died today. I searched for him on Wikipedia and sure enough, there had been numerous changes made today to his article. In fact, looking at the history of changes for that article in itself was a good lesson in information literacy. One of the external links on Wikipedia was to the "official bio" for Russert on the NBC site. As I expected, that site hadn't been updated yet. I just checked again and the external link is gone and NBC took down the page and has added a number of tributes to him on their news site. That's certainly a faster response than the Britannica would have to a change in information, but Wikipedia had the scoop.

Encyclopaedia Britannica recently announced it would allow "user community" to contribute their own articles, which will be clearly marked as such, alongside the tightly-controlled and edited reference pieces. They are both admitting that the wiki model works and maintaining the editorial control that scholars find lacking in Wikipedia.