Wikis

My previous experience/impression of wikis came from googling something to do with Doctor Who, and coming across a wiki with minutely detailed episode guides and character summaries for (apparently) every creature who ever had a second of screen time, or was even obliquely referred to. Ditto with Harry Potter.

Still, I had a good browse over the Oxford Web2.0 wiki, and made a couple of pedantic updates.

Adventures in Wikipedia were much more interesting, as I was unsurprised to see that the revision history of the 'Israel' article has multiple revisions every day, and that people were even getting into arguments in the notes which give the reason for revision.

I use Wikipedia quite a lot, either for an introduction to something about which I know absolutely nothing (or have never even heard of), or for basic facts about something. For these tasks, it's ideal (though I sometimes want corroboration from other sites once I think I've found the answer I want). However, looking at the pages for my own 'specialist subjects', I can see its problems. Everything present on the page for All Souls is factually correct, there are a lot of important things which should be mentioned and aren't, and it doesn't really represent either the history or the current state of the college very well at all.

Similarly, the people who wrote the article on Ben Jonson clearly haven't read my masters thesis. (And to stop you leaping to Wikipedia, suffice to say he was a friend of Shakespeare and mainly known for his plays) he Understandably, there was a lot about the plays and masques and bit about the poems, but nothing about how they were printed and his unusual involvement in every detail of the process from the quartos onwards, or even the significance of the First Folio. Similarly, there was very little about the intellectual and literary culture he was operating within, and his aspirations for drama as a genre. In short, the article is biased towards providing what people are looking for.

I realise that this might seem an odd thing to say - that's what wikipedia is for, isn't it?! - but it seems wrong that all someone looking at this article gets are the basic facts that an A-level student reading The Alchemist or Volpone wants to fill out their essay. The encyclopaedic presentation of Wikipedia strongly implies that it is authoritative, and whilst readers might be aware that they should check their facts in other sources (I corrected a statement that one masque was lost, when it was actually rediscovered several years ago), they wouldn't realise that there are highly significant facets of Jonson's life and work which aren't even mentioned.

Collective wisdom is a powerful tool indeed, but we have specialists for a reason. I have to confess that I hadn't really thought about the limitations of Wikipedia until I looked at the entries for things I already knew about and could see not just what is wrong, but what is missing.

I certainly won't stop using it - how else could I find out in under 10 seconds who Barry Crocker is ("a popular Australian singer, with a crooning vocal style"), or confirm my suspicion that Tweededum and Tweedledee are only in Through the Looking-Glass, not in Alice in Wonderland? - but I will be more wary in future.