Wikipedia

Wikipedia and the traditional encyclopedia

After some moments of thought I decided to make my search query "HDTV" as it is a technical term which has some relevance to me personally, but also being interesting to see how deep these encyclopedias go. The "opponent" is Encyclopedia.com which does its searches on multiple sources/encyclopedias.

The first thing I noticed, and I've seen this many times over by this stage, is that the Wiki article was literally enormous compared to the quite meager description given to me by the multiple result search on Encyclopedia.com. The Oxford Pocket Dictionarys article was only one short sentecne. This could of course be explained be the fact that it is a POCKET dictionary, but the World Encyclopedia and Britannica Concise Enc. was not very helpful either. Also, I noted some marginal occurences of "faulty" language, where small portions of text/words would be plain bad.

There is some difference in how they present their information, also. In traditional encyclopedias (at least in EB in their television article) the information is presented linearly (not unexpected, of course) and as a narrative story. A standard (longer) article is presented in an index, which often contains many viewpoints on a certain topic, much thanks to the fact that many types of people contribute to the site.

Seen as a collective experience, Wikipedia could be said to promote action and cooperation instead of passive information gathering (although I haven't done any contribution to Wikipedia myself). In regards to the nationalist statement on the blog, I personally have a really hard time seeing Wikipedia as something nationally closed. Except the fact that the Wiki is translated into many languages, the fact still remains that English, which is the most commonly used language of the Wikipedias, has authors and contributors from all around the world adding to the knowledge base as opposed to more "nationally bound" cultures, such as icelandic, which is hardly talked anywhere except in Iceland.

Culturally, Wiki has a slight tradition of being quick to embrace pop culture phenomena which is also felt when comparing my chosen query, HDTV, with a traditional encyclopedia. Not perhaps in the regard that HDTV is something very "new" (it's been around as a term since the 80's, and been practically used since the early 90's) but it has had a "techie" stamp since HDTV's have been released on a more massive scale these last few years. It has had an appeal to the common man, or the nerd, and not the academic in particular.

Also, the biggest flaw with Wikipedia has been its lack of dedicated higher-educated professors, the ones doing the traditional encyclopedias. Wiki has had great success in attaining a wide "normal" user-base, which indeed has proven quite skillful in uploading often-times very good information, but the lack of experts could possibly be a setback.

Wiki as a temporal experience is also of some interest. Just as the corrections in daily papers, which "no one" reads, misinformation can be devastating as it is further carried out in information networks, discussions, media, other articles on Wikipedia etc. The lack of a "completed" article lays bare this very notion which makes Web 2.0 and immediately accessible information lucrative but also potentially dangerous. At the same time, the immediate-ness of Wiki (and other Web 2.0 applications/sites) is its strenght. By being able to provide information as it is happening/unfolding it becomes a sort of (hopefully, and in its best possible case) an objective lens through which users can understand current situations. The downside of this is obvious though; In most cases (if you're not actually at the place which you report on) you have only second-hand information, which could possible (and according to some, is always) biased or ready-made for a certain audience which gives you as a Wiki editor rather limited information to give out in the article.

And yes, even if it's always a little nervy to say it, I think Wikipedia is a great site. As long as you are aware about what Wiki is, I think that the site does what it is intended to.

http://www.encyclopedia.com/SearchResults.aspx?Q=hdtv
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hdtv