Good Citizens and Wikipedia

For this past week’s discussion, I found two different concepts particularly interesting. The first topic that I found interesting was the idea that people often spend more time watching T.V. than participating in local organizations. Although I had been aware that people often do not care about what happens in local situations (given how low local voting turnouts usually were), I had never really considered what the implications of this situation were. For instance, I imagine that many people who watch television spend a lot of their time watching entertainment shows or the national news. This is not necessarily a bad thing, except that the time spent watching these programs could be time spent on improving the local community. Now, I am not advocating that people drop all of their leisure activities to work on improving the local community, because that is unrealistic and people should have time to unwind. However, I feel like these activities that occur on the television push many people to neglect issues that might be facing the community. So, people that are engrossed with their television every night might be really concerned about the Iraq war, instead of worrying about the credentials of local candidates running for office. Thus by being good national citizens in being aware of national issues, these same people are neglecting their duties as local citizens in not properly serving their community.
The other topic that I found interesting this past week was the issue of media convergence. The anecdote about the differences between the quality of the Star Wars movies and the Lord of the Rings movies was a good one, because a lot of parts about the former were lacking when compared to latter. Now I know one of the big reasons why this was the case. I think this is interesting because this appears to be a classic case of how self-proclaimed ‘professionals’ pretend to know what is ‘better’ than people part of the average community. Although I am sure many experts are far more qualified to speak about a variety of issues than is the every day person, I still think there are some areas where experts should not pretend to be so high and mighty.
I feel a good example of this is Wikipedia. For just about every single class that I have taken here at AU, without fail, I have had a professor tell me that I should not use Wikipedia. They are always equipped with the story of how they found some article that was grossly inadequate, that the information can be tampered with by ‘just about anybody,’ and that because it is not maintained by professional scholars it can not be a trusted source. I know that anybody can change the content on the pages but I do not believe the information on the site is as terrible as some professors make it out to be. I know that a lot of students and professors alike go to Wikipedia as a good starting point for research, and that even Supreme Court justices visit the site to get themselves acquainted with particular topics for cases. I also think that in many ways, Wikipedia is superior to other encyclopedias. Wikipedia is constantly being updated so that it contains the latest information, which is something no printed encyclopedia can accurately claim. And, I would bet that the few pieces of information on Wikipedia that are wrong are often corrected in a short amount of time so that the whole issue is just really overblown. Academics should not be annoyed/scared that people without visible degrees are encroaching on their intellectual territory, but should instead embrace this high-minded project more readily.