If he could name it, he could lay claim to it, too

I have mixed feelings about Wikipedia. As evidenced by a bagels-and-coffee discussion Drew and I had a few weeks ago, when I'm confronted with the choice of being either pro- or anti-Wiki use in, say, paper citations, I jump enthusiastically to the side of the disdainful academics. Wikipedia, however researched, is a website of compiled information gathered by generally normal people, and you can't trust people when searching for credible voices to plagiarize. People lie. People like to make jokes. People are, frankly, stupid. Doctorate degrees, in contrast, are awarded only when the learned party agrees to simultaneously join a coalition of total, unerring, unbiased perfectionism, and thus they are the only ones we can trust. Plus, doctors talk prettier.

For me, Wikipedia represents one of a handful of topics and concepts in which my opinion on the matter uncomfortably straddles the line between Whippersnapper and Fogie, between what the hip kids on MTV say and what Dick Cheney probably thinks. Basically, it's hard to tell whether what I believe is shaped by legitimate concern for a decline in standards or by a time-honored tradition of the Old not accepting the New. My distaste for Wikipedia used for anything other than general, personal, background, or intrinsic knowledge is largely based on a long-standing (Fogie) belief that the "right" way to do research is to laboriously pour over peer-reviewed books and/or online Ovid articles, spending hours in the library, coffee cup in hand to purportedly keep myself awake as I mistake the bloodshottyness of my eyes as sleep deprivation rather than overexposure to text. There are, of course, other legitimate reasons for the Fogie view - Wikipedia's overdependence on websites rather than journals or reference sources, the potential for random surfers to alter material, the general unknowing haze that exists over how any of the information really does get there, etc - but there are also legitimate arguments to the Whippersnapper side. Some papers, for example, just don't require research to the exhaustive point where anything more than Wiki is necessary, so why go through the surprisingly enormous effort of finding a "general" article among the mass of eerily specific journal articles simply to avoid having a dreaded "wikipedia.com" appear on the citation page?

I guess part of my opinion is also coupled with fear. How is it humanly possible that with three clicks, I found out that a dog named Ajax is the loving household pet of Lawrence Dutton, an American violinist and 1/4 of the Emerson String Quartet of the State University of New York at Stony Brook? Wikipedia terrifies me.