EconTech

I often link to Wikipedia. No, it is not authoritative. Encyclopedias have not for a long time, probably at least the past 75 years, been an authoritative reference on the state of academic knowledge. They have instead transformed into a general reference, a starting point for further reference and research. There was a time, of course, where they were authoritative references. Not only has the stock of the breadth and depth of human knowledge become prohibitively large to reference in any one textual place, but the flow is so large and fast that organizing new knowledge must be done in sub-sub-specialties and reduced in complexity for introductory readings. Thus, regardless of its relative accuracy to Britannica, the fact that there is a valid relative debate on the merits and demerits on each source means that, as a general introductory reading for helping to establish a course of further reading and research, Wikipedia is good enough.

What does this have to do with my linking policy? All search engines use the links found on various webpages to produce a self-organization scheme, which they then apply a weighting scheme to and present to you as a list. My past 5 searches of various topics resulted in the top SEVERAL results being Wikipedia pages. Wikipedia has an adequate search function. Most search engines have methods for specifying results from a particular site. I don’t want to have to wade through an increasing number of useless (for actual research) Wikipedia pages to get to respectable content. If you want to get to a quick reference on a subject, you are entirely capable of searching on Wikipedia, if that suffices your needs. Thus, in order to not add to the Wikipedification of the search engines, I will no longer link to any Wikipedia articles. Of course, my marginal effect is going to be 0, so please, adopt the same policy, and let Wikipedia do its thing, the search engines do theirs, and not mix the two unnecessarily.