Of Wikipedia and Widgets

As I teach my kids about the internet as an information repository, we have spent a fair amount of time talking about Wikipedia. Certainly it is a place to find out about anything, but it is a full of information whose veracity and neutrality are often called into question. My own position on the site, and the lesson I teach my children, is to treat it as resource but not a source.

This opinion is shared by many institutions. I checked with a high school English teacher of mine, Malcolm Flynn, now Assistant Headmaster at my alma mater Boston Latin School. He responds that school policy is that students may read it for general background but may not cite it as a source.

The issue of citing Wikipedia arose for me as I was browsing through a recent issue of 1to1, a marketing and customer service magazine I receive. I spotted this wondrous quote from an article by Jeremy Nedelka:

A widget, or more precisely Web widget, is defined by Wikipedia as a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any Web page by an end user without requiring additional programming.

My first problem here is, not surprisingly, the phrase "defined by Wikipedia." I'm not sure how a writer, a technology writer moreover, can get away with defining anything out of Wikipedia. Donna Shaw, in the American Journalism Review, sheds some more interesting light on Wikipedia in the newsroom in this article . Too bad the editors at 1on1 did not encourage Nedelka to see Wikipedia "more as a road map to information than as a source to cite."

Now I suppose I can get over an occasional slip of citing Wikipedia, but lets look at the definition itself. Yeah, read it again. Now everyone together... "Huh?"

Had Nedelka dug just a bit deeper into the Wikipedia article, he would have found some better ways to explain widgets. Here are two much clearer definitions found in sources listed right on the same Wikipedia page, just one click away each. BusinessWeek:

Widgets are small, easy-to-forward bundles of software that let users play with graphics and information online.

And even better, Clearspring:

These movable mini-applications are used by consumers to craft custom experiences on their desktops, start pages, social networks, blogs and more. Widgets can be almost anything, common examples include games, stock tickers, video and audio players, quizzes, slideshows, personal productivity tools, system utilities...

Finally, of course, one major problems of citing (and quoting) Wikipedia is that it is an unstable text, constantly chaging, sometimes for the good, sometimes for the not-so-good. The definition used by Nedelka in his piece is now no longer quoted the same as it was. The page has been edited more than two dozen times in the last three months.

So, my children, let this be yet another lesson for you in the proper use of citation, quotation, and the wiki-ization of the world.