I have been a loyal Wikipedia supporter since I first heard of it and have also contributed/ added/ amended several articles to this fabulous yet free online encyclopedia.
The beauty of Wikipedia is that any article can be edited by anyone. And as you can expect, there are always some people who will write junk, delete entries - just for the fun of it. This has resulted in one major criticisms of Wikipedia - that several of its articles are not accurate.
The recent controversy regarding John Seigenthaler, did further harm to its reputation and credibility. An anonymous user (which was later identified as one Brian Chase) had implied that the journalist had been involved in the Kennedy assassination. Seigenthaler wrote a scathing article criticizing the online encyclopedia on USA Today
This has led to new rules including barring unregistered users from creating new pages on the site.
I was really happy to read the results of a recent study by the journal Nature which finds that Wikipedia is as accurate as the encyclopedia Britannica and scientists regularly consulted it.
Read the Businessweek report here.
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4 comments:
i like wikipedia too but i have no idea how it really works. i mean like editing articles and all that. it does seems that if just anyone can edit it, the articles might not be accurate. you mean any other articles at all we can edit it? what if some prankster say change the info of some interesting informative article? say the article say that a certain country has 1 million population, and the prankster change it to 2 million. don't quite understand how wikipedia works really (for people to edit/add i mean).
Hi Lucia, I can understand your concerns. But you will be surprised how quickly the error is corrected. Sometimes almost immediately. Thats the power of the internet.
Wikipedia is a real creative thing on the Internet for free. I have been using it for some time now and absolutely love it.
I agree that Wikipedia is wonderful. I have even added the search engine into my Firefox browser for direct search. It's very convenient. The beauty of it is it displays lots of relevant and related links. Surprisingly, I never question the authenticity of the contents. It's good to know, but usually whateveer I search for isn't really sensitive information where accuracy is important. Suits me just fine.
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