Most students have found inaccuracies or outdated material in an encyclopedia. Every librarian knows that it takes at least FIVE years for a new edition of a hard bound version of an encyclopedia to be published. The online versions of encyclopedias aren’t much better as they go through a similar review and editing process before publishing. The editors must find individuals with an expertise in a certain area to write an article, and then the article must go through the publishers rigorous review and editing process before the article is deemed worthy of publication in the esteemed encyclopedia.
Encyclopedia publishers also pick and choose topics for the encyclopedia. Students often go to an encyclopedia for information and do not find that particular subject or keyword covered in the encyclopedia. This is usually the case because the encylopedia is too limited in the amount of space used or too old to have the “latest and greatest” information (even online). This factor alone limits the usability of an encyclopedia to gain information. In the information age where the public has almost instantaneous access to information, an encyclopedia could be considered a dinosaur.
As a school librarian, I already know that the students go to Google or Wikipedia.com or other online services on the library computer before they go to a hard copy of an encyclopedia. I’ve been in school libraries where they have chosen not to order new editions of encyclopedias as they were already paying for an online service and the students didn’t use the hard bound copies of the encyclopedias anyway. At my current school, the only students that use the in-house encyclopedias are those that have been restricted from using the Internet for violating the “acceptable use policies” of the school district.
With this knowledge, where does Wikipedia.com fit into the future of information gathering? Having read _Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms_ by Will Richardson, it is clear that Wikis are the future of information gathering. Information articles are posted on Wikipedia.com and edited by the readers post haste. If there are inaccuracies, they are usually corrected within days, hours, or minutes. Furthermore, experts in fields are allowed access to Wikipedia articles, whereas articles in an encyclopedia are only accessed by those invited by the publishers.
There is one of two ways that encyclopedias are headed in the future: 1) they must become more wiki-like themselves, or 2) they must be revered as the final word or authoritative knowledge in which case, they may be dooming themselves to extinction.
