[ctolsen]

"It’s hard to believe today, but 10 years ago Wikipedia was widely considered a doomed experiment run by utopian radicals."

I have absolutely no recollection of this. Wikipedia has had some trouble, just like any other successful project, but has in my view been widely regarded as a pretty successful project that everyone wants to have around (unless you sold encyclopedias).

[libraryatnight]

I also have no recollection of this. 10 years ago I was in college and Wikipedia was ubiquitous enough that every professor had a policy about its use. It never seemed doomed, maybe it seemed to be finding its place, but to me not doomed.

[clinta]

In my experience, 10 years ago the policy was "Don't use it". It was treated as untrustworthy, despite other encylopedias being acceptable. I haven't been in school in a while so I can't say if attitudes have changed. But I'd hope that modern instructors would consider any encyclopedias to be too generic for citing in research, but acceptable for understanding the basics of a topic.

[dragonwriter]

The policy pretty much everywhere that I have encountered, since I was in elementary school in the 1980s, has been that tertiary sources like encyclopedias should never be cited for the information they contain (except when you are citing it because the point of interest isn't the information that is in the encyclopedia but the fact that it is in the encyclopedia, such as if you are writing about how certain events are presented in various venues.) I think the first elementary school research paper I did was an exception and permitted citing one encyclopedia among the three sources required.

Tertiary sources have always been, in most venues, "acceptable" only as research tools to find primary and secondary sources,

(Oddly, though, its become common in the last few years for even reputable news media sources to cite Wikipedia as an authoritative source. I don't see that really as progress in Wikipedia's acceptance so much as a sign of the increasing laxity of standards in journalism.)

[setpatchaddress]

WRT your parenthetical, it's historically normal for journalists to have lax standards. The web didn't invent pressure to publish. I think you're actually seeing increased transparency.

[Ankaios]

At least for my fields of interest, encyclopediae are never considered appropriate references for college student papers—Wikipedia is not exceptional in that regard.

That said, Wikipedia is untrustworthy. It's a great way to quickly learn about ideas and vocabulary in a field, but it's riddled with misconceptions, misinterpretations, deceptive slants, and other errors. It's important to treat it with a healthy dose of skepticism and base research work on original sources instead. Regardless, though, it's an amazing resource that I'm sure has accelerated research productivity at all levels.

[ska]

   It's a great way to quickly learn about ideas and vocabulary in a field, but it's riddled with misconceptions, misinterpretations, deceptive slants, and other errors.

In other words, it's an encyclopedia.

[Ankaios]

Quantity has a quality all its own, regarding both aspects.

[josephmx]

2 years ago it was banned in my sixth form still, but the sources at the bottom were allowed. The principle was "anyone can edit it, therefore only trust things with multiple sources". A reasonable policy really.

[zeveb]

> 2 years ago it was banned in my sixth form still, but the sources at the bottom were allowed.

That's a really good lesson about sources in general. One can't even trust a primary source, except as an indicator about what someone at close hand thought to write down; it and everything which references it will have biases, slant and perspective.

There is such a thing as truth, but it can only be approximated.

[deelowe]

Technically, that's always been the case for encyclopedias for any college serious about academics. You should cite the source, not the editorialized version of it.

[dspillett]

> In my experience, 10 years ago the policy was "Don't use it"

IIRC from back then it was more like "never us is as a main source" and "for [deity]'s sake don't cite it", which I think is still pretty much the case.

It was often a useful way to find other useful sources though, either through explicit links in the articles or by introducing the reader to useful search terms they'd not thought of or otherwise been introduced to, and people were encouraged to use it for that purpose (but that purpose only).

[moron4hire]

I think it's important to point out the huge generational gap that formed around that opinion. It was really only the Baby Boomers who looked down on Wikipedia during that time. We all had a sense of their growing lack of relevance back then, but it hasn't been until today that we generally all agree the Boomers won't regain relevance.

[spike021]

Not sure if this is a universal change, but at least in my experience with professors the past few years I've been told it's ok to use code examples on Wikipedia for stuff or that I can cite articles.

But on the other hand, I've had other professors still say we aren't allowed.

Maybe they're warming to the idea now.

[yuncun]

Honestly, I feel like High School teachers don't like Wikipedia because it's overpowered. What's the point of making a research assignment when Wikipedia already contains all the research a student could want?

[coldtea]

>In my experience, 10 years ago the policy was "Don't use it".

Well, for academic purposes, it still is.

But then again, as then, it's still used for those purposes now, despite the policy.

[thoth]

>"It’s hard to believe today, but 10 years ago Wikipedia was widely considered a doomed experiment run by utopian radicals."

I can't believe nobody has responded to this with [citation needed] yet! ;)

OK seriously now, I kind of remember some rumbling about the challenges facing the project: crowd-sourcing a general purpose encyclopedia, generating enough money to keep things running without showing ads - who would write the content, the quality would be terrible, etc.

I'm not sure it was "widely" considered as doomed, but I'm also sure the breadth and depth of topics and overall result ranges from outright shock to pleasant surprise of the naysayers.

Wikipedia has flaws but overall it is a great reference on a massive variety of topics. Here's an anecdotal example: I'm a hiker and a friend and I ran across a weird looking fruit on the trail. After taking pics and asking around we were told it was an "Osage orange". Never heard of it, so I went to Wikipedia and found a lot of info and yes, that was definitely it. I can't imagine Encyclopedia Brittanica, World Book, any of those I remember from my youth, would have had as much info on the Osage orange!

[gfsn54nsf]

A neat exercise for anyone who thinks Wikipedia isn't a useful reference is to pick ten random subjects from Encyclopedia Britannica and see how many of them have an article in Wikipedia. (Answer is most likely "all of them".) Then do the opposite:

Space Flight Operations Center (in wiki but not E.B.) Hypertrocta (in wiki but not E.B.) Sokół motorcycles (in wiki but not E.B.) Paradeudorix petersi (in wiki but not E.B.) Bella Voce (in wiki but not E.B.) ...and so on...

Now there is a certain amount of vandalism, rumor, political skew, etc. so you should take what you read in Wikipedia with a grain of salt, but at least it's there. Most of the time it will point you to a more authoritative source in case you think someone's being deceptive about Osage oranges.

[davidgerard]

There were lots of Very Serious People writing about how this thing obviously couldn't possibly work. We mostly ignored them and got on with it.

[_rpd]

> I can't believe nobody has responded to this with [citation needed] yet! ;)

It's a fair question. Here's what I could find from 2005 ...

"The One for All model has delivered solid results in a remarkably short time" http://www.wired.com/2005/03/wiki/

Wikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems Yes it's garbage, but it's delivered so much faster! http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/18/wikipedia_quality_pr...

[spacehome]

This is my recollection as well. I and everyone I knew thought it was the bees knees. I'm sure they had trouble with getting money and scaling and bad-faith editors, but the basic idea of the project was and is thought of as awesome.

[josefresco]

Besides the articles about how a select few editors actually maintain the bulk of Wikipedia, I too have no recollection of Wikipedia being considered a "doomed experiment". I've been working in the industry since before 2000, so I'm not sure what happened in 2005 to warrant this.

[arjie]

I remember people talking about how it would be inaccurate and full of nonsense because people would just put in whatever they wanted. Britannica would be the source of wisdom, and Wikipedia would be from the masses, full of errors. This was in 2002 or so.

[ambicapter]

I can confirm I heard this sentiment echoed back then and I'm pretty sure that this is what the article title is referring to. That nobody here remembers this point of view surprises me, frankly.

[gareim]

Don't remember this either. I distinctly remember using it on recommendation of my older cousins for elementary school essays and the teachers loved everything I wrote.

[astazangasta]

I started editing wikipedia in 2002, when there were just a few hundred editors, and you could still measure the zeitgeist by trolling Recent Changes. I used to get very annoyed at how much time people wasted editing 'List of songs whose title is not in the lyrics'. The early years were rocky.

[acheron]

Ha, that page. I haven't looked at it for years and years but it used to be one of my favorite examples of Wikipedia nonsense -- the page was created in order to have "Bohemian Rhapsody" on it: that was the entire purpose of its existence. But eventually a few editors decided "Bohemian Rhapsody" didn't count and started edit wars whenever someone tried to add it back in. Good times.

[weego]

Yeah the only thing I can remember is people talked about it being economically not viable to run based on its business model.

[iamwil]

I remember this. I was out of school a couple of years by that time.

If you read the history of ubiquitous technologies that we take for granted, you'll see the same attitude repeated. The car, plane, radio, television, light bulb, the UN, etc. you'd have to look at the really early form of these things.