The Expanding Universe of Wikipedia

I’m going to disagree with vidalhoward. I think this was a nice, innovative way to display some information. Sure, one can’t use this in a boardroom–but, who cares? I think we all see graphs enough, anyway.

I hate it when people throw the term “controversy” around – it’s like “notorious,” a term so loaded with negative connotation, yet free of specific meaning, that it has become a simple epithet to describe something the speaker dislikes without being able to justify the negative description.

In the case of wikipedia, its creators succeeded in creating a resource which is both sui generis (or was until the concept attracted imitators) and which is a brave stab at the problem of creating a reference work which draws on the knowledge of its users.

If by “controversy,” one means that wikipedia articles are not always reliable – why, this can be said of any work of reference.

Any compendium of knowledge is agenda-driven in one way or another; otherwise, no one would bother with all the work involved in compiling and publishing them. The best we can hope for when consulting references of any sort is to acquire a skill for assessing the truth of information resources, or at least accounting for their source’s reliability.

Wikipedia isn’t perfect, but it is impressive. What I find most impressive about it is how well the open editorial process works in winnowing out the informational chaff.

It also increasingly provides information that it’s difficult to locate elsewhere on the Internet without some skill in constructing search engine queries. Caveat emptor, however, is as applicable to what you read there as it would be in more conventional references (which also harbor misinformation, with the added problem that they are often pseudovalidated by appearing in print, or stamped with some falsely reassuring imprimatur of authority).

I have to agree with that the transparency in this article lacks visual impact and fails to use graphics to communicate its points effectively. In the language of business presentation, the graphic transparency on wikipedia is a “duck.”