Graduating and becoming an official librarian should mean no more papers, right? Not for me. I'm currently working on a presentation about Wikipedia and Popular Culture. Here's the accepted proposal.

It is the job of the Reference Librarian to provide patrons with the most accurate information available, and in order to ensure accuracy a certain level of authority is looked for in sources. One of the most common criticisms of the user-authored and web-based encyclopedia, Wikipedia is that the lack of authritative authors makes it a risky source of information when compared to traditional print encyclopedias. Although there is much validity to this criticism, it does not serve the reference librarian to completely dismiss Wikipedia. It is able to offer unrivaled access to information on today's popular culture.

Traditionally, encyclopedias have been limited to entries of proven historical or cultural relevance because of space constraints. If print encyclopedias were to contain entries on every semi-popular televison show or fad, they would soon contain too much information to be useful. The virtually unlimited space of the internet eliminates the need toprove relevancy thus allowing things which are important to the current time period to be catalogued.

In order for something to warrant space on Wikipedia all it takes is one person to feel that thesubject is relevant. Popular culture and Wikipedia are a perfect match for each other because the true scholars of popular culture are the people. The criticism that Wikipedia is written by regular people is now a strength because it allows the culture of the people to be written by them. The open source software that allows anyone to edit it means that the inforamtion can be immediately updated.

One of the best tools offered by Wikipeda to Reference Librarians is the bibliographic citations. ALthough librarians may be hesitant to recommend Wikipedia as a primary source, many entries provide authritative books, articles and web sources. Ultimately librarians who dismiss Wikipeda as an invalid source are ignoring information that could help meet patron information needs.