Wikipedia And The Changing Habit Of Looking Things Up

When I was younger, looking something up usually meant finding the right book. A home encyclopedia — Britannica, Larousse, or whatever the household owned — had weight, order, and roughly 120,000 articles. If the information was not there, the search had to continue elsewhere. The library. A teacher. A more specialized reference.

Wikipedia has changed that habit for me, and probably for many people.

What Wikipedia is

Wikipedia was founded on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. The model was simple and at the time seemed unlikely to work: anyone could edit any article at any time. No credentials required. No editorial board. The page you read is the current version of whatever the community of volunteer editors has produced.

By September 2007, Wikipedia has grown to roughly 2 million English-language articles and tens of millions of articles across languages. It is consistently among the most visited websites in the world. For many ordinary factual questions — who was this person, when did this event happen, what does this scientific term mean — it has become the first stop.

The quality question

The obvious objection is that anyone can write or change anything. Critics, including many teachers who discourage its use in academic work, point to the possibility of errors, vandalism, and bias on contested topics.

These concerns are not unfounded. Quality is uneven: obscure topics may have short, unreliable articles, while popular or controversial topics attract both careful editors and determined partisans. Vandalism — deliberate misinformation — occurs regularly, though it is usually reverted quickly, often within minutes.

But a notable 2005 study published in Nature compared Wikipedia’s science articles to the equivalent entries in Encyclopædia Britannica and found that the average number of errors per article was similar: four per Wikipedia article versus three per Britannica article. This was surprising to many people, given the difference in editorial models.

The other relevant point is that Wikipedia is unusually transparent. Every article has a revision history. Every change is attributable to a user account or IP address. Talk pages record disputes. The sourcing of claims is expected and enforced by editors. A reader who checks the references on a Wikipedia article is doing roughly what a careful reader should do with any secondary source.

How to use it well

The skill is knowing when “good enough for orientation” is sufficient and when it is not. For understanding the rough timeline of a historical event, grasping what a technical term means, or finding who a person was — Wikipedia is well suited. For citing a source in academic work, or for questions where accuracy matters enough to verify — follow the references and use those directly.

This distinction between orientation and verification applies beyond Wikipedia. The web in 2007 provides faster access to information than any previous generation had, but it does not provide a faster way to determine which information is reliable. That judgment still takes time and attention, and easier access to more information may actually increase the burden on judgment rather than reduce it.

I sometimes miss the physical encyclopedia habit of reading the article next to the one I wanted, because the layout of the book created accidental learning. The web is faster but more directed. Wikipedia has made curiosity significantly cheaper: a question that came to me at midnight can be answered before I sleep. Whether that convenience improves or degrades thinking about the question is something I am not certain about.