According to this post to the Dig_Ref listserv, there’s been discussion about Wikipedia on the MEDIEV-L listserv. The chain of posts is confusing, but the Dig_Ref post discusses a post made to MEDIEV-L and reposted on NetGold.
The most interesting thing to me about the Dig_Ref post is that someone in the thread calls for a boycott of Wikipedia:
Certainly if we maintain a strict diet of research and peer reviewed journals we will see only high quality refined truth and accuracy. Consider this fine example of responsible scholarship.
A strict diet of research and peer reviewed journals? Yawn. Heavens knows I’d be the first to speak up in favor of expertise, but to restrict one’s reading to peer reviewed research? I think not. That’s like an intellectual version of a high-fiber diet: good for you, but fairly indigestible. Where are you going to get your wacky ideas from? Not everything needs to be empirically validated to be interesting. Not to mention that any journal pub is already at least 2 years out of date by the time it sees print. If this person was suggesting this diet only for consumption in reference work, that would be one thing, but that wasn’t what was written.
I can’t believe I’m finding myself defending Wikipedia now. But there must be a middle ground here, something between totalitarianism and anarchy. Or not so much a middle ground as a continuum of authoritativeness. I suppose Harnad saw this coming over a decade ago with his Scholarly Skywriting model of publication:
Once we recognize that the archiving of scientific ideas and findings is ALREADY on a continuum, with varying degrees of formality, reliability and even of peer validation (as in the prestige hierarchy among journals, from the most rigorously reviewed ones at the top to what is virtually a vanity press at the bottom), it is natural to transpose all of this into the electronic dimension as well. I have proposed that TWO dimensions should be implemented in the archival continuum…
The idea is to have a vertical (peer expertise) and a horizontal (temporal-archival) dimension of quality control…
This vertical hierarchy would be based on the contributors’ degree of expertise, specialization, and their record of contributions in a given field. In principle, the hierarchy could trickle down all the way to general access groups for nonspecialists and students at the lowest read/write levels…
The horizontal dimension would then take the surviving products of all this skywriting, referee them the usual way…
The NetGold post ends on the note that:
…an electronic Wiki-like resource is infinitely updatable; it is, in a sense, always a work-in-progress.
Maybe all this hoopla over Wikipedia comes down to just this, that sources in different media have different update cycles: electronic sources have a fast update cycle, while paper sources have a slow cycle. Big whoop, librarians have known that for years. Maybe it’s just that the rest of the world is discovering and freaking out about the phenomenon of differential update cycles for different types of information sources.