Robert McHenry was once Editor in Chief of Encyclopædia Britannica and his experience brings credibility to his recent critique of Wikipedia. He certainly doesn’t pull any punches:

The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him.

It’s not surprising to find that someone so closely tied to a traditional encyclopedia would find a lot wrong with Wikipedia. I get much the same reaction every time I explain what wikis are all about to a group of teachers, and I’ll admit the concept does seem counterintuitive. McHenry’s chief complaint seems to be that with no one in charge, there’s no way to ensure the accuracy of the information. He also points out that group editing doesn’t always produce the best quality material by pointing to a the Wikipedia article on Alexander Hamilton and highlighting a less than stellar sentence:

All these arguments aside, the article is what might be expected of a high school student, and at that it would be a C paper at best. Yet this article has been “edited” over 150 times. Some of those edits consisted of vandalism, and others were cleanups afterward. But how many Wikipedian editors have read that article and not noticed what I saw on a cursory scan? How long does it take for an article to evolve into a “polished, presentable masterpiece,” or even just into a usable workaday encyclopedia article?

So what does this mean for a classroom teacher who would like to utilize a wiki as an instructional tool? Not much if you’re having students creating their own wikis as a knowledge building tool. Teachers already know what good writing and good learning look like, and I expect they will apply those same standards to their students’ work. If students are using Wikipedia for research, that’s a different story. I never encouraged my students to use any encyclopedia, even the Encyclopædia Britannica, as their primary research tool. The teachers I know and work with push their students to use primary and secondary sources and fall back on encyclopedias for general knowledge only.

Whatever its faults, Wikipedia beats Encyclopædia Britannica hands down in the timeliness department. Comments on Slashdot about McHenry’s article point out that Wikipedia had a thorough article describing the prison scandal at Abu Ghraib in Iraq within days of the news story breaking. However carefully edited, a traditional encyclopedia can never keep up with the real world.