Now listen to part of a lecture on the topic you just read about.

The communal online encyclopedia will probably never be perfect, but that’s a small price to pay for what it does offer. The criticisms in the reading are largely the result of prejudice against and ignorance about how far online encyclopedias have come.

First, errors: It’s hardly a fair criticism that encyclopedias on line have errors. Traditional encyclopedias have never been close to perfectly accurate. If you’re looking for a really comprehensive reference work without any mistakes, you’re not going to find it—on- or off-line. The real point is that it’s easy for errors in factual material to be corrected in an online encyclopedia—but with the printed and bound encyclopedia, the errors remain for decades.

Second, hacking: online encyclopedias have recognized the importance of protecting their articles from malicious hackers. One strategy they started using is to put the crucial facts in the articles that nobody disputes in a ‘read-only’ format, which is a format that no one can make changes to. That way you’re making sure that the crucial facts in the articles are reliable. Another strategy that’s being used is to have special editors whose job is to monitor all changes made to the articles and eliminate those changes that are clearly malicious.

Third, what’s worth knowing about: The problem for traditional encyclopedias is that they have limited space, so they have to decide what’s important and what’s not. And in practice, the judgments of the group of academics that make these decisions don’t reflect the great range of interests that people really have. But space is definitely not an issue for online encyclopedias. The academic articles are still represented in online encyclopedias, but there can be a great variety of articles and topics that accurately reflect the great diversity of users’ interests. The diversity of views and topics that online encyclopedias offer is one of their strongest advantages.