Wikipedia vs. Subscription Reference Sources

Last week, I mentioned that a group of students on a panel discussing how they do research all spoke of using Wikipedia to do background research on topics, ideas, concepts, etc., before diving in to find books and articles in our subscription databases. I've decided to undertake a little (unscientific) experiment to see how wise a course that may actually be. I've been reading Clay Shirky's great new book, Here Comes Everybody, for the past week and find it's chockablock with ideas from different disciplines. In the next week or so, I'll take a handful of concepts in the Shirky book and look them up in:

• Wikipedia
• Encyclopedia Britannica
  
• Gale Virtual Reference Library
• Oxford Reference Online

I want to see how many of the concepts I look up are main entries in these different resources (the latter three are ones that my library subscribes to). I realize that this experiment has a few flaws:

• Shirky's book focuses on technology topics, a subject that Wikipedia is highly regarded for in its coverage
• Gale Virtual Reference Library is not really a database per se but more of a platform allowing a library to subscribe to a customized collection of reference books in electronic form; no two libraries are likely to have the same collection of books
• Oxford Reference Online subscriptions allow you to subscribe to different packages of reference sources; like Gale Virtual Reference Library, libraries do not all have the same collection

I've created a table in Google Docs that I'll update as I work on it. Feel free to check in on the document from time to time, but also be aware that I'll post a new blog entry to let everyone know I've finished the project.