Meeting of the Mind

[This is the beginning of a thought.]

Colleges (including Middlebury early on, and departments at the University of Texas at Arlington eventually) ban its use for citations.

Our category for encyclopedias (or other traditional reference materials) is that of reliability and no need to question.  Perhaps the name, with that “paideia” root, is the problem–which we might not have if it had been called Askyourneighbor.com or “the wall” in one of the social networking sites.

Wikipedia achieves accuracy the way peer review works:  there’s no absolute standard to measure new discoveries (by definition–they’ve never been known before), so we just run them by a lot of people (granted, different communities may function in different ways) and approach the truth iteratively.

Thus, Wikipedia must be used appropriately.  The problem is not the object, but the process of using it.  It should be used as a journal, not a book.  A book is the culmination of expertise gathering and review.  A journal is a snapshot along the way to a finished more definitive work, i.e., a book.  Everything in Wikipedia is an iteration.

[Thought to be developed, possibly with supporting examples and other rhetorically convincing features.  Finding a true tie-in to neuropsychology would be nice, too--maybe something about the neurotransmitter associated with feelings of certainty?]