Anybody who knows me at work knows I love wikis. They are an amazing way to organize information on a personal level, and even better when a group contributes knowledge to such a structured, accessible database. I have implemented and used wikis ranging from the elegant (Mediawiki, which runs Wikipedia, and the extremely easy-to-use WikiServer implemented in Mac OS X Server) to the clunky (like PmWiki and a python version that got hacked last spring because the security was harder to control), and non-web-based versions on my phone and on my laptop. But really I have to say it: I love Wikipedia!

Sure, it leads to all sorts of confusion and conflicts with students who browse Wikipedia for 10 seconds for the answer to a question (and worse, when they copy text from Wikipedia into their paper). Sure: it can be wrong. It is only as good as the people involved who are writing the text. It is not as clearly peer-reviewed as a journal article or a book, though it is most certainly “peer” reviewed. Bias exists everywhere in life, and as long as you are okay with the wabi-sabi nature of information as it filters out to us, Wikipedia is a really good place to start sometimes.

I’ll admit it, I’ve used it as the basis for some of my own knowledge as a biologist. I’ve also contributed to information that is out there. And frankly I’m completely okay with colleagues, students, and so forth using it in the same way I do: a starting point for discovery. As long as the little Bayesian in your head reminds you that the truth is probably only about 90% (in Wikipedia and in life) knowable, you can often figure out what you need to know, where you need to look to know it more certainly, and whether you are even searching under the right rock for this knowledge.

Anyway, maybe I’m just overtly justifying the fact that I’ve actually donated to the Wikipedia foundation, but I think it is an astounding bundle of admittedly imperfect knowledge about the planet that I’m pretty grateful for. How else do you satisfy the curiosity of a four-year-old (or, sometimes, a graduate student) if you don’t have this at your fingertips?

Need one more reason to like Wikipedia? Check out this page. I bet you’ll lose at least 10 minutes browsing there.