I know I’ve done it. You’ve probably done it. Hell, most of the country is doing it nowadays. We’re all using Wikipedia as our one and only source of encyclopedic information these days. Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit,” is becoming the most pervasive source of both general and specific knowledge that I have seen lately. I used the site for references to my thesis project before my advisors told me that I was being foolish — and they were right.

Reading a recent blog post the author was trying to describe quantum mechanics and, instead of attempting to confuse the reader any more by continuing in a less-than-obvious explanation (summarizing his own words), he linked to Wikipedia. So he’s assuming that the author of the Wikipedia article has a level of knowledge in the field higher than the blogger’s. Though that may be true, how does he know? Ok, so I’m not sure that the blogger isn’t an expert on the subject of quantum mechanics and just a poor conveyor of the information (thus knowing that the Wikipedia article was correct), but I’m going to assume for the sake of argument that it’s not the case.

In an effort to show that there are better options (sorry blogger guy, I’m not trying to pick on you, it’s just an easy target), I went through the top 30 Google hits on the subject “quantum mechanics.” Here’s what I found:

• Quantum mechanics (Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) (1st Hit)
• Quantum Mechanics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) (2nd Hit)
• An Introduction to Quantum Mechanics (Ohio State University) (10th Hit)
• quantum mechanics (Encyclopaedia Britannica) (25th Hit)

So Wikipedia shows up first, which is definitely one of the reasons some people are referencing the site. But just below that is an institution with a ‘.edu’ domain name, meaning it’s an educational institution (and you could do worse than Stanford for simple things like computational number theory, philosophy, and quantum mechanics). Seeing Encyclopaedia Britannica at 25th place does cause some anxiety — it says to me that either the publication is not what it used to be, or people are simply not concerned with disseminating correct information.

I’m going to wrap this up here, but please, please keep doing correct research and try to split up the citations you use out there. If Wikipedia offers a “good enough,” or even great read on the topic (such as the article on the StormTrooper Effect), then by all means reference it. But if there’s something that can be better cited it well worth the effort to keep the standard of research at a higher level.