Growing Pains
Posted by: Rebecca Vnuk
I’ve come across two thought-provoking articles that discuss Wikipedia and Google, forces that have radically altered the way people seek and find information and, by extension, the way libraries provide reference service.
The article on Wikipedia, “Is Wikipedia a Victim of Its Own Success?“ (from Time magazine), examines why Wikipedia’s growth has flattened in recent years. One reason may be that more editorial intervention has created “a community not very hospitable to newcomers.”
The Google article, ”Google’s Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars,” appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The author, Geoffrey Nunberg (School of Information, University of California at Berkeley), says that the book search doesn’t work for scholarly inquiry because “the metadata are a trainwreck, ” and he provides numerous examples of incorrect dates, misclassifications, and other problems. There’s a link at the end of the article to a presentation Nunberg gave at the Google Books Settlement Conference in August, with images of some of the errors. The comments that people have posted to the article make interesting reading, too.
