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Wikipedia is a great place to look for a quick answer, but graduate students need to find credible sources for their papers. After all, graduate students are training to become credible sources in their fields.

The Economist published this article in the magazine’s Technology Quarterly supplement about Wikipedia’s editing policies. Two factions are battling for Wikipedia’s very soul:

• Inclusionists want Wikipedia to have articles about any and every topic, with even the most trivial details of real and fictional items;
• Deletionists want Wikipedia editors to exercise a more selective policy, which would require the deletion of many articles and trivial details.

A third moderate faction, the mergists, is seeking compromise. There are more details in the Wikipedia article on this inclusionism.

Nicholas Carr addressed this debate in his 5 September 2006 and and 8 September 2006 articles in his blog. Carr recommended “forking” Wikipedia into deletionist and inclusionist versions, which brings to mind visions of Unix. He also mentions the mergists and 18 other factions. Perhaps Monty Python should write a skit about Wikipedia.

This article by Nicholson Baker in the New York Review of Books has another perspective. Baker reviews Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, and Baker’s article is a long, funny look at how Wikipedia has evolved in the last 7 years.

Baker also includes a link to Reid Priedhorsky’s scholarly article on Wikipedia article creation and deletion.

• 27 January 2008: Authority and convenience
• 15 January 2008: Wikipedia is 7 years old today
• 6 December 2007: The Truth
• 7 December 2007: Wikipedia co-founder recasts his advice
• 24 November 2007: Citing Wikipedia
• 7 March 2007: Wikipedia promises to review writers and editors
• 7 March 2007: Fake professor stops editing on Wikipedia
• 24 January 2007: Microsoft wanted to pay for Wikipedia edits
• 24 January 2007: More thoughts on cheating, copyright and paraphrasing

Cisco Systems, the world’s largest network equipment company, has released its largest switch ever. The Nexus 7000 can move 15 terabytes of data per second, and is designed to connect distant data centers together. According to Forbes, that is fast enough to move the entire Wikipedia in about 40 seconds. The 1-meter tall box will require special cabling and cost US$200,000 a year to maintain and operate.

As companies move their servers and data storage into larger data centers, these types of switches are necessary. The continued growth of web-based applications is also supporting this trend. Networks are a lot like plumbing, but there’s only a finite amount of water on the planet. The amount of data produced and stored continues to grow.

According to a Reuters article, John Chambers, the long-time CEO of Cisco, believes network growth will continues at a fast pace for the next ten years as ISPs and data centers add capacity.

Hawaiian Telcom CEO Mike Ruley was dismissed yesterday. His replacement is Stephen Cooper, co-founder or Kroll Zolfo Cooper, a New York City-based interim management firm. Cooper is best known as the Enron’s CEO during the company’s bankruptcy. Today’s Star-Bulletin article has a brief biography of Cooper. Kevin Nystrom, a senior director at KZC, will join HawTel as COO.

While Cooper stated in today’s Honolulu Advertiser that HawTel is not a “distressed company”, it’s now clear that the Carlyle Group is unhappy with their acquisition’s performance. HawTel has lost thousands of subscribers to mobile carriers and Time Warner Oceanic’s VoIP services, leading to US$137 million in financial losses since 2006. I mentioned some of the operational issues on my old blog on 16 November 2006, and last week BusinessWeek discussed how market forces have affected the US telecom industry overall.

The Advertiser noted that Ruley put his Kahala home on the market in early January, which is a possible indication that changes were coming at HawTel. The company has eliminated over 100 management positions since October 2007.

Courtesy of the Chronicle of Higher Education, I found links to two articles in the Times of London. In the first article, Professor Tara Brarbazon describes the research policy for her first-year students: no Googling or Wikipedia. Students should consider the authority of the source material, instead of PageRank or convenience. In a response, Times columnist Magnus Linklater portrays Brabazon’s ban as a short-sighted elitist, while praising Wikipedia for its low error rate. Wikipedia has announced that it will conduct a survey of its users and editors, with the assistance of the United Nations University and Maastricht University.

Of course, balance is important, as I mentioned in my 15 January 2008 article about Wikipedia’s seventh anniversary. Wikipedia and Google are convenient starting points for research, but students need to develop their own search skills.

More library databases are available in surprising ways. This Chronicle article from 7 January 2008 discusses how university libraries are posting their own Facebook applications, to provide their students with easier access to reference materials.

Wikipedia is celebrating its 7th anniversary online today, according to Wired. Here’s a link to Wikipedia’s article on the site’s history.

I’ve written about Wikipedia’s reliability and authority before, and most of these articles can be found under this blog’s wikipedia tag. Here are three of the better examples:

• 7 December 2007: Wikipedia co-founder recasts his advice
• 24 November 2007: Citing Wikipedia
• 7 March 2007: Fake professor stops editing on Wikipedia

One issue I haven’t mentioned is how some commercial web sites like answers.com and reference.com repost the content of Wikipedia articles. John Seigenthaler learned about this practice the hard way in 2005, when a Wikipedia article about him was fact-checked.