Wikipedia: The Know-It-All

1. What do you think are the author's main points in this article?

I think that Schiff's basic summation is that while a fascinating experiment, Wikipedia is not to be particularly trusted. The site has merits, among them its ability to include many, many points of view in its articles, but most of its merits work against its credibility in some way as well.

2. An important part of credible writing is selecting good supporting evidence. Select a passage from this article that illustrates the effective use of supporting detail. Explain why you think it is particularly effective.

"Wikipedia may be the world’s most ambitious vanity press. There are two hundred thousand registered users on the English-language site, of whom about thirty-three hundred—fewer than two per cent—are responsible for seventy per cent of the work. The site allows you to compare contributors by the number of edits they have made, by the number of articles that have been judged by community vote to be outstanding (these “featured” articles often appear on the site’s home page), and by hourly activity, in graph form. A seventeen-year-old P. G. Wodehouse fan who specializes in British peerages leads the featured-article pack, with fifty-eight entries. A twenty-four-year-old University of Toronto graduate is the site’s premier contributor. Since composing his first piece, on the Panama Canal, in 2001, he has written or edited more than seventy-two thousand articles."

This article states a potentially controversial opinion, that "Wikipedia may the world's most ambitious vanity press," then the author supports that claim with figures from the site itself. The figures are astonishingly weighted to favor the author's opinion.

3. Throughout the article, the author compares Wikipedia to the Encyclopedia Britannica, but not specifically on design. How would you compare the two encyclopedias from a design perspective?

Both encyclopedias are immense "volumes," but Wikipedia is far more vast. Its design is far more nested than Britannica's; it cross-references to itself far more often. In fact, linking one Wikipedia to another is highly encouraged. In this way, the site can be overwhelming and unrefined. Britannica contains a huge body of material, but it is laid out in a very linear fashion. The design is straight-forward and easy to reference. Wikipedia's nature does not lend itself to an easily-referenced source. It is a crude and unfortunately unreliable source that can change literally at a whim. Britannica has the advantage of years of legitimate background research and peer review.