Presentation at SFPL: Wikipedia Meets the Library

Two nights ago I attended a presentation by Professor David Silver of the University of San Francisco, entitled "Wikipedia Meets the Library."   The San Francisco Public Library hosted his talk, and it is all on Silver's blog.   Unfortunately, the blog version doesn't do justice to Silver's engaging talk.

Silver specializes in digital media.  For two semesters now he has asked his class to edit the Wikipedia page about the University of San Francisco (USF).  The first time was last fall, with a class of 80 students.  He tried again this spring, with a seminar of 12 students.  In both sessions Silver hoped that his students would learn how Wikipedia works, and about the challenges and rewards of collaborating on a digital project.

A similar obstacle cropped up for both classes--the fussy editing the students received at the hands of Wikipedians, some of whom have powerful over-writing privileges over the work of others.  Wikipedia has become such a huge site that its original free-spirited ethos had to yield to a level of bureaucracy and systematization. 

But in Silver's telling, certain Wikipedians went beyond quality control into subjective territory such as encouraging students to model the page for USF after that of institutions like Harvard.   Wikipedia is not as democratic as it purports to be, or at least as its popular image suggests.  Whether this is good or bad depends on your point of view.

The persistence of editing by the Wikipedians was the main constant between the two sessions.  In many other respects Silver felt that the second session was more successful than the first (he began by pointing out that it is just as important to discuss what doesn't work as it is to trumpet our successes.) 

The first session was much larger than the second, making it harder to manage. But class size only counts for so much.  There were two critical reasons for the greater success of the second session:

• In Part II Wikipedia was contextualized within the panoply of Web 2.o tools, so that by the time students began to use it they were already familiar with Facebook, Google Maps, Flickr, and Twitter.  (Students used Twitter to post tips for each other as they were editing the Wikipedia page.)  Making the Wikipedia page was the culmination of their efforts, the chance to put what they'd learned to use.
• The second session featured better coordination with the USF library, so the librarians could point USF students to good sources for citing on their Wikipedia page.   Silver plans to expand on this collaboration in future versions of the class, so the libraries can be ever more helpful.  Much of his audience was librarians, so of course this went over well.

We've reached the point where people admit that they constantly go to Wikipedia; this is much less taboo than it was a few years ago.  That's fine as long as people know how Wikipedia articles are created and edited, and how to evaluate entries critically.  It's easy to underestimate the power of the valuable contextual clues interspersed within Wikipedia articles, such as "citation needed" flags and section labels that note controversial content.  And we tend to valorize the entries published in the Britannica, even though much of the "scholarship" of previous eras makes us cringe today.

Or maybe those battle lines are softening and I need to get with the times.  I'm not sure.  All I know is that Wikipedia isn't going anywhere, and that librarians can help with making sense of it as well as providing good sources.  Next month I'm teaching a class for high school students that will include an overview of Wikipedia.  Why bother telling them not to use it when we can talk about how to use it well?

Comments

[beth]

Interesting post, Marcus. I haven't worked my view of Wikipedia into any presentations, possibly because of the looks I'll get from the professors, but when I meet with students individually, I do tell them that I use Wikipedia. Granted, I let them know I use it if I know very little about a topic, and highlight the references at the bottom as the next step to take--and NOT to cite Wikipedia, but if something in an article looks interesting, go to the source (whether a journal article, newspaper story, etc.) and proceed from there. Similar to Google, Wikipedia is a tool I use nearly every day, but often to provide general background info and to point me in the right direction (but not to cite).