The Wikipedia Effect

There was a lot of discussion about Wikipedia at this conference. The President's program featured a talk by Sue Gardner, who is the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation. On Monday, I attended a very interesting panel discussion entitled "The Wikipedia Effect: How the World Finds and Evaluates Information". The panel consisted of moderator, David Tyckoson, editor of Booklist's Reference Books Bulletin, Paul Kobasa editor-in-chief of World Book, Phoebe Ayers, librarian from UC Davis and Wikipedia contributor, and Debra Hoffman, Information Literacy Coordinator, California State University, Channel Islands.
Paula Kobasa gave a history of the encyclopedia (and was gracious about Wikipedia). He also talked about teachable moments about discerning information. Phoebe Ayers talked about her students using it and also a brief history of Wikipedia and her role as an editor and contributor. She said that librarians have a call to work on it.
I really enjoyed Debra Hoffman's presentation in which she talked about the use of Wikipedia with class assignments. In one English class, students do a lot of research on a certain author, and determine what it means to be an expert. A student will then evaluate the Wikipedia page for his/her particular author. They check for accuracy, authority of of source material, authority of page contributors, scope, intent (why was certain information included and why was others not?). For another class, students are given a topic (such as member of the family for whom the library is named). Students use a variety of sources, such as scholarly journal articles, web resources, statistical data, interviews, and archival material and create a Wikipedia page. In some cases, the page was edited after the page was created, but that was also used as a teaching moment about Wikipedia.
Debra also started her presentation with this funny clip explaining what Wikipedia is: