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August 04, 2006, 03:54 PM ET
Wikipedians Ponder Their Relationship With Academe
Wikipedia’s greatest asset may be the fact that its articles are continually contested and changed: Information on the site is nothing if not up-to-date. But for scholars, the online encyclopedia’s ephemerality can be a double-edged sword (The Chronicle, July 5). How, after all, does one properly cite an article that seems to be constantly evolving?
Wikipedia may soon have an answer. The German-language version of the Web site is experimenting with a method for marking sections of text that are well-written enough to be frozen in time, said Jimmy Wales, the encyclopedia’s founder, today at Wikimania.
German Wikipedia editors will identify parts of articles as “stable versions”—passages that are tougher to vandalize and, therefore, easier to cite. “When we identify a particular section as stable, it keeps getting edited,” according to Mr. Wales. But the stable version is also kept on the site until editors decide that a later iteration is superior.
“Stable versions” may help to assuage some professors’ concerns about Wikipedia’s credibility. But if the general mood at Wikimania suggests that the relationship between Wikipedia and academe remains strained at best.
Elijah Meeks, a graduate student at the University of California at Merced, presented a paper that touched on many of Wikipedia’s flaws—including often-indifferent prose and some serious problems with accuracy. But Mr. Meeks decried the academic community for its “unseemly” and “provincial” response to the Web site. “The university needs Wikipedia more than Wikipedia needs the university,” he said.
Afterward, a professor in attendance accused Mr. Meeks of playing down his colleagues’ misgivings about Wikipedia’s reliance on amateur scholars. “Some people do know more about some things than other people do,” he said. “There is still a hierarchy of knowledge.” —Brock Read
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