Wikipedia

Wikipedia is well-used by my children for their school projects. We have always been impressed by the quality and clarity of content for their topic needs, with clickable links (cross-references). I must confess that I hadn't investigated it further for more 'serious' information. I read the information pages first which discussed some of my questions about page vandalism and content veracity. I was interested to read more about the history and discussion pages, and the possibility for creating watchlists of articles to keep tabs on any changes they undergo. This caused me anxiety yesterday.

I then did some searches for a variety of subjects and finally landed on the Refugee Studies Centre page which was a bit out of date. I dithered about editing but felt safe to add a line about the RSC Library collections moving to the SSL in August 2009. I made the change and hey presto - an updated section within seconds! This really brought home the point at the start of the information pages that while Wikipedia is an encyclopedic reference tool it is also a frequently and readily updated news resource. I also appreciated the fact that there were no advertisements. I was really irritated by the blinking adverts on the wiki page yesterday.

Wikipedia seems to be quite the phenomenon and so very different to the beautifully bound multi-volume set of Encyclopedia Britannica that informed my childhood school topics all those years ago. I must show them to the children next time we visit Grandpa...