I am a huge fan of the tv show, "The Office" (American version), and in this week's episode, the main character, Michael Scott, talks about Wikipedia. To set the scene up, Michael is preparing to go into a meeting in which one of his workers is asking for a raise, but he cant give it to him. Thus Michael goes to wikipedia to find different actions he can do to demand a dominant position over the worker asking for the raise. The clip i show is an aside he says to the camera about Wikipedia.
So he basically hits upon exactly what we are talking about in class, issues with participatory culture. Michael talks about how anyone can add to the site and thats why it was a great place to get information, since many people brought knowledge to the table. As we talked in class earlier, this is good to an extent, when people start posting "ilovemichelle" randomly throughout pages, the information seems less reliable. While Michael sees wikipedia as a viable source, its important to realize that his character is the unintelligent one, therefore when he praises wikipedia, the show is really talking about ridiculous it is. And as avid as a fan i am, i am not sure i really believe that.
As horrible as the idea may be (to look up tactics on the internet on how to avoid your underpaid worker) I have realized that I rely on wikipedia for weird things as well. No i do not cite it if I am writing a paper on Chinese footbinding practices, but you better believe i searched wikipedia first to get some key people and phrases to search for on scholarly journal websites. So i guess i would have to say that wikipedia is definitely the first step in a lot of my searches. We toyed around with this idea in class, that wikipedia can be the answer to a lot of random things you may want to know the general answer to, however it is not as well-suited to be used in pieces that require qualified claims.
