Wikipedia (Part One)

Wikipedia (Part One)

The methods in which Wikipedia publishes and edits their articles have made it an easily accessible encyclopedic source for many in the past few years. Wikipedia, as author Andrew Dalby explains in his book The World and Wikipedia: How We are Editing Reality, is a collaborative online repository of information. Despite that fact, the procedures by which articles are produced have created disputes concerning the credibility and accuracy of Wikipedia's information. Dalby shows how Wikipedia works in his first chapter; Wikipedia is a self-organizing, self-correcting, collective effort to produce the sum of all human knowledge. Anyone can easily publish or edit an article -- that's how it works.

There has been great criticism about how Wikipedia works because of its encyclopedic likeness. Dalby talks about the history of the encyclopedia. The content creators were academic and therefore provided reliable, truthful information. That's why they hate it (Wikipedia). People see Wikipedia as an encyclopedia so they believe that all information published on Wikipedia is credible; having said that, the way Wikipedia works generates criticism because of the misinformation and disinformation anyone can provide. The content creators of Wikipedia include a myriad of people -- some of them are scholars, but most of them are common people that were never formally trained in any particular subject that they could write about.

Be that as it may, we still use it. Wikipedia is a great starting point for information query. It's been regularly indexed by Google, so usually the first search result leads to a Wikipedia entry. It's a great source for sources. The entries are generally summaries from credible sources so you don't have to take the information in the entries at face value, you can check the sources and make sure it's credible and get more detailed information from the sources too. Also, the idea that a collective group of people can be more accurate and up-to-date than the Encyclopedia Britannica makes sense for its use.