Tuesday 18 January 2011

Librarians, Wikipedia and multiple sources

Various New Jersey public librarians on Wikipedia:
Wikipedia has profoundly changed the way most of us gather information. It may have had less effect on the people whose job it is to look things up: reference librarians. Yes, they'll use it sometimes, they told us. But with misgivings, and never as a sole source.

What Jim Beckerman, staff writer at NorthJersey.com, or perhaps the librarians themselves failed to mention is that, really, nothing should be trusted as a sole source. Sure, Wikipedia is designed to be simple to edit but it does track those changes and who makes them. The same cannot be said with most other sources.

So don't use Wikipedia and nothing else. As Thoreau said, "corroborate, corroborate, corroborate". Or something like that.

Read more of "Library pros have doubts about Wikipedia" from NorthJersey.com.

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