Web Reviews

Taking Internet Research Tools Beyond Wikipedia

Indianapolis, IN - June 2, 2010

“Kids today have it easy… when I was a kid, we had to go to the library to do research– up hill both ways!”

– Jim Cota

I’m not generally one to spend a lot of time looking back and thinking I’d like to relive any part of my childhood, but I can’t help but wonder what things would have been like growing up with the Internet. At the risk of sounding like one of those old guys who had to walk to school four miles through the snow– uphill both ways– kids today have it easy. When I was in school, reports were based on dry text found in dusty encyclopedias which were probably out of date long before they arrived in your local library. (That reminds me: we had to go to the library to do research!)

Now, with the Internet, kids have access to a wealth of accurate, timely information on nearly any topic you can think of. Wikipedia still remains the de facto standard for research, having an archive containing more than 15 million articles (3.3 million of which are in English), making it the largest and most popular general reference work available. Even with that wealth of information, or perhaps because of it, Wikipedia is certainly not without its detractors. Critics point out that the departure from expert-driven content generation to crowd-sourcing lessens its authenticity and invites vandalism. Research suggests, however, that vandalism is generally short-lived, and an investigation in Nature found that the material they compared came close to the level of accuracy of Encyclopedia Britannica and had a similar rate of "serious errors". When you factor in the speed of updates and the breadth of current information, Wikipedia is very tough to beat.

If you need to go beyond the facts, there are a variety of places to turn. To really get a handle on how stuff works, the best resource available is, well, How Stuff Works. Originally founded by North Carolina State University Professor Marshall Brain (yes, his name is really “Brain”) in 1998, the site is now owned by Discovery Communications and has greatly expanded the available content. How Stuff Works aims to “Demystify the world and do it in a simple, clear-cut way that anyone can understand.” To accomplish this, they provide comprehensive articles with graphics and videos to walk you through nearly any topic clearly, simply, and objectively.

If you’re looking less to understand something and more know how to do it, eHow can probably help. The focus here is more on helping you actually DO things… their online community is dedicated to giving you the ability to research, share, and discuss solutions and tips for completing day-to-day tasks and projects. With 20+ categories and more than 150,000 videos, chances are pretty good that you can find what you need here, especially if it’s a task-oriented issue. An interesting side note: unlike Wikipedia, which is updated by volunteers around the world, the articles on eHow are sourced by people who are then paid by how many times their articles are viewed. So if you have a particular skill and an ability to write, you might find you could make a little residual income by penning articles for eHow.

So what if you’re just looking for data, and maybe a way to better understand it? One of the more recent entries in this area is ThisWeKnow. ThisWeKnow has a completely different perspective on data creation: they don’t want to do it. Instead, they access several different databases presenting information collected by and made available by the government. Their mission is to present this information in an easy to understand and consistent manner, (hopefully) empowering citizens to act on what’s known. Which begs the question, “What is known?” Things like rates of pollution. Employment. Population trends. Right now, the site is focusing on presenting data from about six different datasets. But longterm, the goal is to “model the entire data.gov catalog” and make it available for viewing on the web. Ultimately, they hope to “provide citizens with a single destination where they can search and browse all the information the government collects.” Yes, that says ALL the information the government collects, which you can probably imagine, is quite a lot. But we paid for it, so shouldn’t it be available to access? And wouldn’t it be great if it was easy to understand, as well? That’s where ThisWeKnow is heading and, if they succeed, school reports will be better and the people who write them will be smarter than ever.