Web Site of the Week: Wikipedia.org
Posted by: Christine Bulson
Those of us that were librarians in the early nineties remember the excitement of Encarta, the CD-ROM encyclopedia produced by Microsoft. Now less than twenty years later technology has progressed to the online encyclopedia. Wikipedia appeared in 2001 and many librarians (myself included), were skeptical. How could a free online encyclopedia be written by anyone who thought that they knew something about anything. Now I, and I believe most librarians and teachers and some professors consider Wikipedia an acceptable general encyclopedia. According to the entry for Wikipedia in Wikipedia it is the largest most popular general reference work with 365 million readers. I have to admit a year ago I put my home encyclopedia, the 1992 edition Americana, in permanent storage when I realized I hadn’t used it in five years. The currency of Wikipedia is one of the many reasons I think it is superior to any print encyclopedia. In more than one instance, I have noticed that an entry will be updated in less than an hour. How can a print encyclopedia compete with that?
