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 | This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
- This essay is still in its larval stage, but aspires to be a NPOV assessment of Wikipedia. All well-meaning Wikipedians are encouraged to help its metamorphosis into something useful and good!
The scope of this essay is to evaluate Wikipedia's success or failure as an encyclopedia, using the standard accepted criteria for all encyclopedias: overall size, organization and navigation, breadth of coverage, depth of coverage, timeliness, readability, biases, and reliability.[1][2][3] Other encyclopedic criteria peculiar to Wikipedia may be considered as well, such as the fraction of high-quality articles and the stability of its high-quality articles. Of course, Wikipedia has many non-encyclopedic aspects, but evaluating those aspects falls outside the scope of this essay.
Each encyclopedic criterion is given its own section below, with six subsections: Context, Data, Pro, Con, Overall assessment and Methods for improvement. All Wikipedians are encouraged to provide brief, well-reasoned and well-referenced arguments for both sides of every criterion. The goal is to identify Wikipedia's areas of strength and weakness dispassionately, ideally in comparison to a well-defined standard encyclopedia, such as the Encyclopædia Britannica. We should also note the cases where the presently available data are insufficient to make an evaluation, and where we should strive to obtain decisive data.
Despite the Pro and Con sections, the goal here is not to produce duelling POV polemics. On the contrary, the goal is collaborative insight; we seek to really understand what is right and what wrong with Wikipedia. Ignorance and faulty reasoning are our enemies, not each other. Therefore, we should not avert our gaze from the ugly and foolish aspects of Wikipedia; yet neither should we shrink from glorying in its virtues. We should strive to understand one another, to feel the force of one another's arguments and to recognize when a point cannot be decided. We are literally trying to comprehend Wikipedia and one another; although the goal is more ambitious and more laborious than a simple polemic, the prize is all the more worth winning.
- ^ Kister, KF (1994). Kister's Best Encyclopedias: A Comparative Guide to General and Specialized Encyclopedias (2nd ed.). Phoenix, AZ: Oryx Press. ISBN 0-89774-744-5.
- ^ Sader, Marian; Lewis, Amy (1995). Encyclopedias, Atlases, and Dictionaries. New Providence, NJ: R. R. Bowker (A Reed Reference Publishing Company). ISBN 0-8352-3669-2.
- ^ Purchasing an Encyclopedia: 12 Points to Consider (5th ed.). Booklist Publications, American Library Association. 1996. ISBN 0-8389-7823-1.