It’s been a while since we’ve had a Question of the Week. Fans of the site may recall that the Question of the Week was originally inspired by the Edge Foundation’s annual question, asked to leading thinkers. This year, their question is “What have you changed your mind about? Why?”

For me, I’d have to go with Wikipedia. When I first heard about the open source encyclopedia, I scoffed. It was one thing for the Internet to allow anyone to post their opinions, but quite another to trust the general public to get encyclopedia-style facts right. Without authors putting their names on their work, the information would be worthless.

But as I started using Wikipedia, I found it to be an invaluable resource. I assured myself that I wasn’t really using it, only using it as a casual reference. But over time, I was surprised to find it a source I could rely on. Of course, it’s not always accurate, and I still couldn’t see myself actually citing it as a source in a publication, but it’s way more reliable than any of us would have had a right to expect.

The tipping point for me was reading Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen. I was expecting this to be a madcap trivia book of fun facts about American history that never made the textbook. Not so much, no. Instead, it was a detailed historiography of twelve American history textbooks and how they knowingly distort and obfuscate their subject matter. After that, I could no longer consider Wikipedia to be inferior to the textbooks we’ve been giving students all this time. I would actually trust a fact in Wikipedia over one in a textbook if they were in conflict.

But it’s not just facts; Wikipedia is also superior when it comes to point-of-view. I laughed at their value-neutral philosophy, because such a thing isn’t possible. At least, it’s not possible where there’s a single author. But in the negotiated definitions of Wikipedia, there is a natural balance of viewpoints that really gives the readers a sense of the range of opinions on a particular issue, often just as valuable (if not more so) than the dry facts. Even fake controversies seem to be quickly expunged from its pages.

I’ve changed my mind about Wikipedia. How about you?

What have you changed your mind about? Why?

This entry was posted on Monday, March 10th, 2008 at 10:49 pm and is filed under Education, Information Literacy, Meta, Question, Social Studies, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.