by John McWhorter

As the French say, for me Eric Rauchway's post tombe juste; just the other day I was remarking to my wife how if I were still teaching, I would have to be grappling with what to tell students about using Wikipedia for research. When I last taught at Berkeley in spring, 2002, I had just learned the word "blog" and barely anybody knew from Wikipedia. I had already given in to the fact that students would do some of their research on line in general, however, such as in my class on the world's creole languages (like Haitian, Jamaican "patois") or on the diversity of languages and dialects in the United States. My rule was that no more than two websites were allowed in a bibliography, and I always did a little speech about how one had to be very careful using websites and make sure to confirm as much as possible on them in more august written sources. Five years later, however, there is so much more online relating to languages--online dictionaries, grammatical sketches, cultural information, etc.--that for me to keep the students down to two entries would often mean condemning them to omit information only available online, which I would not even wish upon myself in my own research. And the fact is that as messy and "democratic" as Wikipedia is, it fills in a lot of bibliographical holes that I used to have to help students fill in with conference handouts I had filed in drawers, vanity-press booklets one comes upon here and there, and so on. However, at this point, when it comes to languages at least, there is no comparison between Brittanica and Wikipedia in terms of accuracy, even though Wikipedia has a great deal of information--most of it, presumably, correct--that Brittanica doesn't and vice versa. Wikipedia's entries on creole languages are often bedecked with outdated notions, and although I carefully tweaked the entry on the creole I am most familiar with, Saramaccan, to fix the rest of them would require an amount of work I would have to charge for! My advice to students would be to do exactly what I do, which is to drop in on Wikipedia for basic information and possible leads to other areas, but to refrain from citing Wikipedia information unless it squares with what you find elsewhere. That isn't far from what has long been considered the right approach to encyclopedias, especially ones a notch below Brittanica. I must admit that in that year just before Wikipedia started getting around, I realized a lifelong dream and got myself a Brittanica set. Yep--the big brown books, now taking up space on my shelves. I'm not ready to admit that the Web and Wikipedia render them obsolete--curling up with the longer articles on this and that can be nice. But I don't use them nearly as much as I would have ten years ago, or--I'll fess up--much at all.