Wikipedia thoughts
As part of my other life, I posted thoughts about the Wikipedia/John Seigenthaler controversy here:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/brassratgirl/286343.html
here
http://www.livejournal.com/users/brassratgirl/287207.html
and here:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/brassratgirl/287277.html

I also posted my idea for writing a wikipedia evaluation guide: http://www.livejournal.com/users/brassratgirl/286557.html
as follows:
One idea I've been batting around is writing a guide to evaluating wikipedia, esp. from a librarian perspective. I've actually been requested to do so by a couple collegues [who want it for instructional purposes, especially in pop culture classes] and I think it could over well. Thoughts? Suggestions?

I know I'm not the only person to think of such a thing, or possibly to even do it, and I need to find out what other people have actually done, and look at their work before going forward. There's an introduction to Wikipedia *for* librarians that's been started here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Librarians/Introduction
but that's not quite the same thing. I'm thinking more for students.

There's also a big debate going on right now over referencing, and how references should be used, collected and managed within WP. There's this proposal, among others: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikicite
and this one: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Textrose
It's all very interesting and complicated. We have a two-fold problem of a) getting cites in the first place and b) verifying them, and we have to do it on a *massive* scale -- 750,000 articles to be fact-checked in English, is my conservative estimate. How to do this? How to manage references, bearing in mind that WP is multilingual and international and references often refer to in-country publications? The textcite proposal is essentially for a wikified, distributed, openly commentable bibliographic system. Textrose is a citation analysis tool, essentially putting Wilson's theoretical guidelines of trusting text into actual practice. (It would also show what bits of a text haven't been cited yet). I need to study these more, look into them in depth before I form a real opinion.

What I am more fascinated by is the question of how to get contributors to cite their sources -- a basic problem that, as I wrote in my Seigenthaler commentary, is not always well-practiced in academia and academic journals, let alone the internet (sj reports he's been having similar conversations in other venues). A lot -- (many? most? some? no one knows) of WP contributors are quite young -- younger than college age, for instance. These folks, (many? most? all?) of whom are undoubtedly smart, many of whom are brilliant, still may have never been exposed to "why and how we cite" type information (especially since this is poorly taught in college, let alone high school, let alone to non-humanities students). How to make this a wp priority?

Finally, on the subject of collecting wiki literature, Nichtich and PatrickD, a couple of Germany librarian(students?) that I had the pleasure of meeting this summer, are working on this: http://tools.wikimedia.de/~voj/bibliography/index.php?action=readOnly which mirrors, precisely, my own thoughts on the subject. Good for them!