The US-based Language Log takes issue with the following remark in a column in Times Higher disparaging Wikipedia:

Times Higher Education - A new chapter for readers and writers Kindle is based on popularity and mass market publishing, as found in The New York Times bestseller list. I am not interested in The New York Times bestseller list. Kindle includes wireless access to Wikipedia. I do not need wireless access to Wikipedia. I would prefer to stir-fry my own small intestines than to have continual access to a site where the entry for Klingon is longer than the entry for Latin.

The Language Log's take is this:

Language Log: Wiki rage in Sussex Stephen Colbert did base a lot of funny material on the idea of a world in which everyone could rewrite the encyclopedia to make it say whatever they wanted it to say (recall the sketch in which he repeatedly altered his own entry). But his entry looks normal and accurate now. Whenever I look up articles on random topics in fields where I have some technical knowledge, in general I am amazed at the quality of Wikipedia. It is constantly revised and improved, and is astonishingly up to date (for example, try looking up the entry for a famous person who died yesterday, and you will probably find that the death has been covered). Adding yet more to the Klingon language entry won't alter its quality, any more than adding to the Latin language entry would reduce Professor Brabazon's rather snobbish hostility to it.

As before, I have to side with the Language Log. One particular feature of most Academic criticisms of Wikipedia (and the newly declining standards of scholarship) is that they are based on exactly the same low standard of inquiry that they are accusing the modern times of. Barabazon's hostility towards Wikipedia is not only snobbish but also superficial and profoundly non-academic. She doesn't ask any questions. Doesn't examine her own assumptions and prejudices. She's simply following a safe established script.

This is doubly surprising because she makes some very enlightened points about the Kindle's potential effect on reading (while snubbing it for its focus on bestsellers).

Surely, she's aware that Wikipedia is a reference resource created for the people in line not only with the 'people's' demand but also willingness to contribute. Complaining about Wikipedia's inadequacy of an entry on Latin is not an indictment of Wikipedia but of the Latin scholarship community. But it's really a reflection on Barabazon. It only took me a minute to confirm the Log's reporting that the entries for Klingon and Latin are almost exactly the same length but also that Latin has six subarticles (History, Alphabet, Grammar, Declension, Conjugation, Instruction) of significant length as opposed to Klingon's one rather brief one (Writing Systems). This takes Barabazon's offhand remark from inappropriately hyperbolic to slanderously misleading.

But her troubles don't end there. It turns out that the entry on Esperanto (another invented language) is twice as long as either Latin or Klingon. Given that Klingon and Esperanto have impact on the lives of about the same numbers of people whereas the number of people Latin has influenced over its long history is incomparably greater. True, Esperanto has an established literature and a certain number of native speakers, so the disparity in length compared to Klingon might be justified (I didn't count the number of sub-entries here but is greater than Latin).

Now, we could simply conclude that this disparity is another nail in the coffin of Wikipedia's credibility but the real question to ask is are these entries of high quality and sufficient comprehensiveness appropriate to the subject? A cursory examination seems to suggest that they are. As a linguist, I'm heartened by the number of links to high quality entries such as phonetic systems, language typology, etc. in the entry on Klingon. A Star Trek fan wishing to become better educated in the functioning of human languages could do much worse than visit that entry. Also, the length of the Esperanto entry is justified because we find the necessary information on Esperanto cultural context which is limited for Klingon and contained in a variety of other Wikipedia entries for Latin (Roman Empire, Classical Latin, Vulgar Latin, Romance Languages, Ecclesiastical Latin, and countless others). In short, by any standard, Wikipedia provides appropriate amounts of information for all three subjects in sufficiently high quality to be expected of any one reference resource and Kindle's inclusion of Wikipedia is probably more useful to its customers than if it contained the entire Britannica which lacks the depth and scope of the information on Latin (460 words vs. Wikipedia's 3,000+) and Esperanto (360 words vs. Wikipedia's almost 8,000), and leaves out Klingon entirely.

I couldn't check the quality of the full Britannica online entries because of it's closed nature but I'm sure that it doesn't contain such useful information as the entire spelling out of the second conjugation.

It seems like a lot of fuss to make about a silly aside in an otherwise pretty good article but I'd say it's ok for professor Barabazon and other academics to deprive themselves of a remarkable resource but we should not take their imposition of this same veil of ignorance on their students lying down.

Sure, there are many inaccuracies on Wikipedia. But if you don't like them, correct them!!! There are many articles on popular culture, but if you're not interested in them, don't read them!!! There are entire areas missing (just like in all reference materials) but why not start interest groups to work on them. For instance, the entire area of British educational philosophy is severely underrepresented on Wikipedia. Why not establish a collective of academics active in the area to remedy this? And why not make it count against proper research activity? The answer why this is not likely to happen (such as how unlikely it is to get funding for a project like this) reflects poorly on the academia, NOT Wikipedia and it's community of dedicated editors.