Wikipedia

It's hard to believe that Wikipedia has only been around since January 2001. It began as an offshoot of Nupedia, a project started to produce a free encyclopedia. Wikipedia is made up of the terms wiki and encyclopedia.

I find Wikipedia very handy. If I don't know a term, I will often check it out in Wikipedia, especially if I want more than just a dictionary definition. Most of the time, the information in Wikipedia seems pretty accurate to me. Once, I was working on a school reader about Dance in America and had to look up terms like rock 'n roll, lindy hop, jitterbug, cake walk, etc. What I found in Wikipedia matched the information I found elsewhere. Sometimes I had difficulty locating printed material and was glad Wikipedia was there. I could usually tell just by perusing an article if it seemed well written and factual.

And so I was interested in an article in American Libraries, August 2008, called "Dissecting the Web Through Wikipedia." It recommends using Wikipedia as a starting point in research and not demonizing the site. Students will use Wikipedia, so librarians can use it to teach students to evaluate and use critical thinking skills when regarding information. Its articles' lists of source materials can lead to valuable information. Students can compare the information in the Wikipedia article to information in the source material and compare accuracy. Students may come to the conclusion that some Wikipedia articles are well researched and others have abundant errors. What students will learn in this process is how to reach these conclusions.

Students can be taught how to look for biases and for the credentials of the author of the Wikipedia article. The student can ask - does the information in this article match what I already know about this subject? Students can learn how to gather sources and information that will support the Wikipedia article or refute it. In this way, Wikipedia can be brought into the discussion of research and, in the process, students will become familiar with the library OPACs and other online tools for finding journal articles and other source materials.

Following this article is a short one called, "A Call for Sense." In it, Jack Baur asks if librarians' badmouthing of Wikipedia is really necessary. He says that we all know Wikipedia can be edited by anyone and can be imperfect. But he says that he is shocked when librarians tell patrons absolutely not to use the site. Some librarians are even thinking of blocking access to the site in schools and libraries. He asks how librarians can convince the world that we are technologically savvy while we trash one of the biggest of the Web 2.0 phenomenon. He says it often does provide a good introduction to a subject and the articles link to other valuable sources. He points out that we don't try to ban other tools that we have.

I find that I agree with Jack Baur and the author of the earlier article, Adam Bennington. I have to agree that I find Wikipedia useful. Having been taught how to research in college years ago, I do know how to find information I need for a topic in the "old" ways. We need to make sure we pass these basic research tools and techniques on to our students and patrons. But Wikipedia can have a place in this research. And perhaps some of out patrons/students will end up contributing to the on-going work that is Wikipedia and being proud of that.

Creative Commons plus

I heard Lawrence Lessig speak in Minneapolis last spring at a Media Reform Conference sponsored by FreePress.net. He was an amazing speaker. His was no "death by power point" presentation. His talk, both verbally and on the screen behind him, moved very fast and was original and thought provoking. He was there to speak about his "Change Congress" project. From Wikipedia I learned that he hoped that, through the Change Congress project, voters would be able to hold their representatives in government accountable. He's concerned with corruption in politics and the influence of money on politics. To me, this seemed like a good - using the-web-to-inform-and-empower-the-people - type project.

Then I came across him again in our textbook which mentioned him in connection with the Creative Commons. I googled that site and watched a short video with people talking about what Creative Commons means, interspersed with photographs and other artwork that use the Creative Commons' new copyright license. Some of the phrases I caught from the video were - "shared culture," helps with the "Can I use that photo?" question, "a new type of folk culture," "people want to share stuff," "here's the things you're allowed to do," "the law gets in the way when creators want to share." From this site, I learned that the Creative Commons gives people tools to make a choice about copyright. The way it was before Creative Commons was - commercial use or not commercial use. "Creative Commons gives you the right to exercise your copyright in more ways, more simply." So you can still own the copyright to your work, and you can still get all the royalties for the use of your work, but you can also choose to share your work freely while still owning the copyright, if you want that. And there are choices in between and beyond these.

On the Creative Commons website, they say that they set creative works free for certain uses. "Our ends are cooperative and community-minded, but our means are voluntary and libertarian. We work to offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them." They provide a "some rights reserved" type of copyright, a spectrum of possibilities rather than just the "all rights reserved" versus public domain type of copyright most people are familiar with. Creative Commons is part of the free software and open-source movements.

Then I went to Lawrence Lessig's blog. In a December 2, 2008 post titled open-government.us, Lessig said he was encouraged by the decision that the Obama transition team made to freely license change.gov. Lessig and others are now coming up with "open government principles," such as "Free competition (no alliances should favor one commercial entity over another, or commercial over noncommercial entities." In an earlier blog dated December 1, 2008, Lessig talks about how "the Obama team has modified the copyright notice on change.gov (which isn't actually a .gov entity so is not exempt from the rights of copyright) to embrace the freest" Creative Commons license. (Lessig also has a campaign going to try to get UTube to support the Creative Commons by letting people pick a license for the work they upload.)

Then, on December 5, 2008 on CommonDreams.org, I read an article by Amy Harder in The National Journal reporting that Lessig, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and MoveOn.org are applauding Obama's stated commitment to open government. This article announced the website where the above coalition released the three prinicples stated in Lessig's blog post. A day earlier, the Obama transition team had already agreed to the first principle "that its Web site, change.gov will implement a new copyright policy - the Creative Commons License - that allows for more widespread use of its content." The article further quoted Lessig saying, "Nobody knows exactly the best way to do this right now... So that calls for this kind of ongoing discussion, both inside and outside of the administration."

Blogs and the internet are fostering this type of discussion between citizens and government in an exciting new way that will be interesting to watch. It's exciting that this new administration is even in on this kind of discussion. And Lessig and his blog are pushing this envelope. I think I'll bookmark him.