Beware the “Anticredentialist” Wikipedia

Wikipedia, the encyclopedia anyone can edit, made it to the 25th Annual Charleston Conference on acquisitions this November. There Daniel Mayer, volunteer CFO of the Wikimedia Foundation, ostensibly present to engage in a discussion of the impact of Wikipedia on traditional reference, confronted a series of criticisms about the wiki reference resource. Critics focused on the questionable authority of unidentified, volunteer contributors and the reliance on users to catch errors.

Mayer noted that Wikipedia is, after all, an encyclopedia—merely a starting point. He said that the upside of engaging various minds in a project that gives them ownership outweighed the risks of doling out mistaken information to naïve readers. “We’ve been called antielitists,” he said. “I prefer the term anticredentialist.” Researchers should confirm what they find there—and apparently they must, since Wikipedia only removes incorrect content after it’s been challenged by a user.