Sunday, February 27, 2005
Whither Wikipedia; or, the Know-It-Alls
How good is Wikipedia? How good is a print-based encyclopedia? Is the accumulation of facts a process necessarily anathemic to open collaboration? Free Software Magazine's got a fiery little debate rolling on this very topic; Aaron Krowne's got a great pro-Wiki rebuttal to Robert McHenry's dismissal of the phenomenon, previously appearing on Tech Central Station. No Slashdot-style slapfight, that (even if McHenry attempts to compare reading Wikipedia to using a public restroom): Krowne's head of digital library research at Emory's Woodruff Library, while McHenry's a former editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Meaty epistemological fare. (UPDATE 5 March 05: Free Range Librarian's downright mortified by all of this, and discusses the embarrassingly behind-the-times stance of another one of McHenry's ilk -- ALA prez Michael Gorman. Let it hereby be known that I dearly love libraries and library culture -- and dearly hate seeing old farts like McHenry and Gorman attempt to encase it all in glass. As if we all want to go back to the days of closed stacks and shushing...)
