The Radical Encyclopedia

As a student, I have heard for years, "Don't use Wikipedia as a resource for your work," and spent much of my academic career completely believing that it was not a real resource and something that was not reputable. I'm sure others have heard all the same pleas and arguments against the website as anything more than "an unreliable overview" of a variety of topics.

But, in taking a closer look at Wikipedia, it's amazing to me to hear that a majority of people's arguments against the site are actually the exact opposite of what it's founder instills in the community that develops the site. The TEDTalks interview with founder, Jimmy Wales, was fascinating to me as an individual striving for unbiased material in this very opinionated digital world. Despite being encouraged to seek my information elsewhere, Wikipedia has always been a resource that I have used without question when I wanted to find information about broad topics or very popular ones.

As a resource, the website has been invaluable to me simply because of how easy it is to access the information. We don't have the dusty shelves of encyclopedias in our homes anymore because we have the internet (and everyone know you can find anything on the internet). But, finding anything also means either paying for a "reputable" service or trudging through useless websites until you find one that has valuable information on it- and even then, students are not able to reference most websites in academic writing.

I now, fully support the mission of the Wikipedia community. I greatly appreciate their collaborative approach to sharing knowledge and fully agree with their approach to neutrality in their content. I have seen first hand how they manage neutrality on pages containing controversial topics and I have learned a lot from such pages. While they shy away from labeling such work as "objective," for the reader it is objective. They tend to outline the different opinions regarding controversial topics and explain what the sides believe, why they believe it, and who "they" are without slanting the information in a biased way. As Wales points out in the interview, there is no "Truth" to behold on any topic, there are merely commonly held beliefs.

It does no one any good to only hear one side of a controversy from an individual impassioned by the topic. The only way to make independent choices is to be educated about topics and draw independent conclusions. Wales himself described in the interview how when inputting information on their topics they report information from reputable sources- effectively doing research for you in the same way that a traditional encyclopedia editor may have done in the past. The only difference is, the editors of Wikipedia work in a collaborative and dynamic way that allows the information to be regularly updated with new information that is relevant to our fast-paced culture.

In debating the relative importance of having a "radical encyclopedia" versus a "safe and stodgy" encyclopedia, the wording alone leads my to prefer the radical. The words "safe" and "stodgy" for me call up concepts of conservatism, censorship, and outdated information. When I seek information I personally don't want to be spoon-fed, sugar-coated morsels hand selected for me by people who purportedly know what is important about the topic. I want to see it all! Give me the gruesome details, the offensive alongside the reserved. Give me all the sides of the story and let me choose which side I am on.

There is a lot to be said for the quality of learning that can happen in an environment dedicated to collaborative learning and  the kind of "social cooperation" Wales described.

I have no idea what a radical library might be like, but I do suspect it is on our horizon. With the rapid adoption of digitizing software and the desire for many libraries to retain preserved copies of historical and limited books, I imagine that the radical library, like the radical encyclopedia will be digital. The development of software and distribution services for eReaders and digital books has been quite well received and I imagine with the benefits of digital text books and classroom materials that tools such as iTunes U will only continue to spread throughout society. In a world so focused on speed, functionality, and on-demand access, I would expect nothing less.