Liblarva

Me

I am a library science student, and serials librarian.

I am an information professional with an interest in information avoidance, digitization, the digital divide, and I love Ranganathan.

(Wow, looks like I've found my first article to start. Where's that sandbox for new articles...)

I'm also a fan of quiet libraries.

Quotes I Love

“The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses.” -Malcolm X

Like it or not, wikipedia has become an indelible part of the media. When absurd policies overrule common sense (i.e. the sun's not hot without a wp:rs), wiki transforms from a source of information, into a distorted propaganda machine.

"Wikipedia doesn't recognize any concept of "qualification" to edit articles..." -Chaos5023

You don't say.

Articles Everyone Should Read

"With little notice from the outside world, the community-written encyclopedia Wikipedia has redefined the commonly accepted use of the word “truth.” Why should we care? Because Wikipedia’s articles are the first- or second-ranked results for most Internet searches. Type “iron” into Google, and Wikipedia’s article on the element is the top-ranked result; its article on the Iron Cross is also first. Google’s search algorithms rank a story in part by how many times it has been linked to; people are linking to Wikipedia articles a lot. This means that the content of these articles really matters. Wikipedia’s standards of inclusion—what’s in and what’s not—affect the work of journalists, who routinely read Wikipedia articles and then repeat the wikiclaims as “background” without bothering to cite them. These standards affect students, whose research on many topics starts (and often ends) with Wikipedia. And since I used Wikipedia to research large parts of this article, these standards are affecting you, dear reader, at this very moment... So how do the Wikipedians decide what’s true and what’s not? On what is their epistemology based? Unlike the laws of mathematics or science, wikitruth isn’t based on principles such as consistency or observability. It’s not even based on common sense or firsthand experience. Wikipedia has evolved a radically different set of epistemological standards—standards that aren’t especially surprising given that the site is rooted in a Web-based community, but that should concern those of us who are interested in traditional notions of truth and accuracy. On Wikipedia, objective truth isn’t all that important, actually. What makes a fact or statement fit for inclusion is that it appeared in some other publication—ideally, one that is in English and is available free online."

Garfinkel, Simson. (2008). Wikipedia and the meaning of truth. MIT Technology Review, Nov/Dec, pp 84-86

Wikipedians can kvetch about the opinions of academics and librarians all they want, but until some of these basic issues are dealt with teachers and librarians will continue to warn their students "Don't Use Wikipedia."