TheSomeone
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JNightshade said:
I see your point but... (and yes I did write this)
Wikipedia shares the behavior of a living and breathing beast. Looking at it as a an independent entity, we can observe an enormous, self-correcting database of information that grows at incredible rates. If it suffers a wound, it will heal over time and grow even stronger as any other creature would in similar circumstances. Skeptics however, like to point out that while Wikipedia’s growing knowledgebase can be useful for casual browsing, the system’s vulnerability makes it unreliable for serious research. The internet has opened a path to community-based projects such as Wikipedia. I cannot argue that proffesors should regard Wikipedia as a valid source for student research because it retains engraved definitions that change no more than a regular encyclopedia's, I would be lying. The debate takes place on a much higher philosophical level. Wikipedia should be an acceptable source for serious research because it can be changed by anyone, the reason for which people considerate invalid for serious research; it represents a new age of information in which flexibility and availability is put before reliability.
Wikipedia has a much more complete knowledge base than traditional encyclopedias. Wikipedia has a total of 831,000 articles in English, that's more than 8.3 times the amount of articles in the reputable Encyclopedia Britannica; In addition, this number grows so fast I had to update it during the writing of this draft. Wikipedia covers subjects such as technology, current events and modern culture that traditional encyclopedias could not afford to because of the price of writers, so it grows everyday with mounds of useful information. While he Encyclopedia Britannica needs to hawk and hire writers and academic authorities in order to create new articles, specialists don’t need contracts or paychecks to share their knowledge on Wikipedia.
This massive amount of articles may seem rather superficial. After all, why would someone need those extra 700,000 terms explained? Wikipedia makes such an extensive use of cross referencing that every article connects to another, efficiently making every article useful in some way or another. For example, starting from the days’ featured page, I went from an in-depth article on the properties and history of the T-90 Canon camera, to a detailed history of ergonomics, and a few clicks later to a 1000-word description of “Gairaigo,” a japanese term for a “borrowed word.” Traditional encyclopedias do not possess this feature to such an extent, yet it’s a greatly underrated and very important one. For one, it encourages students to specialize in their subjects not by just knowing the information concerning their assignment, but by understanding the circumstances within an entire bubble of knowledge which contains their subject. A student studying the Articles of Confederation, in addition to having an extensive definition of the Articles – which includes a summary of the articles, revisions, lessons, signatures and many other sections – has ready access to the pages for “American Revolutionary War,” “confederation,” “Continental Congress,” “United States Constitution,” within the first paragraph alone. Compared to Microsoft’s Encarta’s article, which has a lame third of the Wikipedia article’s word count not including the copied and pasted Articles of Confederation (it does not even include a summary of the articles), Wikipedia has about 10 times the amount of cross referencing, including the name of every single man who signed the Articles. Now if Encarta used Wikipedia’s open-source format, I could have fixed that, but I can’t. Yet Encarta isn’t even free, so what are we paying for, the feeling of security that the knowledge is clean and intact from internet vandals?
Here lies ones the biggest criticism against Wikipedia. On a NPR segment about Wikipedia, a College Professor called in to voice his concerns that students liberally cited Wikipedia without having a way of confirming who the author was and what how credible his information ought to be. Of course, Wikipedia would be better off without nocuous vandalism such as “BUSH SUX” plastered over an otherwise well-written article , but it’s because anyone with an opinion can easily change the text from a page that Wikipedia offers such extensive and complete definitions. Each page has an accompanying “talk” page in which users discuss changes and additions to a certain page, meaning every article has an entire intellectual discussion behind it concerning the content. Take a controversial topic such as Intelligent design, the talk page dwarves the extensive content of the article itself. Pages and pages of discussion contemplate what intelligent design really means, how to portray it equally from both sides, and how to make the article as subjective as possible. A typical Encyclopedia has one writer and two editors for each article, they certainly don’t bother conducting a discussion with dozens of people before publishing every single article. Traditional encyclopedias work against the foundation of critical thinking. Professors like the caller on NPR readily accept a source because it has a name on it, yet Wikipedia provides information that is constantly questioned, discussed and.
Aside from the point-of-view vandalism on Wikipedia, many are afraid to encounter fallacious information that students could not immediately spot. For example, if I wrote “In 23 BCE, 10,000 Roman troops marched towards southern Egypt,” not everyone can readily discern this sentence as purely fictional. However Wikipedia records every change it undergoes, logging the user’s IP, and the time, date and description of the change. The changes are then reviewed by the core community of Wikipedia, hundreds of volunteers who check on the changes daily. Take as an example of such criticism the website wikiwatch which is dedicated to point out factual errors in Wikipedia. For one, it strikes me as strange why anyone would rather host a website and pay for a monthly fee to point out errors in Wikipedia rather than simply fixing them. But more importantly, the wesbite bears a disclaimer at the top: “By the time you read my comments, Wikipedia’s article will probably have changed.” Even opponents who feel strongly enough to host anti-Wikipedia websites acknowledge Wikipedia’s fast self-correcting system. Not all encyclopedias, however, has the ability to correct their mistakes like Wikipedia does. One of my favorite pages on Wikipedia is entitled Errors in the Encyclopædia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia, in which a total of 49 errors have been spotted so far, in categories ranging from History to Math.
Wikipedia has earned the nicknamed of “the faith-based encyclopedia.” I agree. However the faith should not lie in whether a certain article is correct or not, but it should lie in the people behind the project. Maybe people out there really do care about what information we get off the internet, maybe not many people fell the need betray others by putting up fake information online. Accepting Wikipedia as a source that teachers encourage their students to use and cite is a first step to admiting that knowledge is a communal entity and no longer a secret shared amongst the privileged as it was 200 years ago. No one can call his knowledge ultimate and impose it as fact, and Wikipedia concedes to that. In an age in which we are bombarded by information every day because technology makes it so readily available, we must all exercise caution in what we should be considered true and what should not. By constantly changing and revising itself, Wikipedia acknowledges that information can never be absolute.
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