Love it or hate it, Wikipedia is here and it’s definitely not going anywhere. This past week I have been reading The World of Wikipedia: How we are Editing Reality, by Andrew Dalby. This book has definitely brought up some interesting points and views about Wikipedia. The book starts of with some prime examples of how Wikipedia is used and how it works. The first page of chapter one gets right into a perfect example of the power of Wikipedia, telling about an article that was written about an earthquake in Italy only an hour or so after it actually occurred. The article was written in Spanish, but by the end of the day there was an English version of the article about the earthquake, and both articles had been edited numerous times. (pg. 1) From there, Andrew Dalby goes on to give a brief history of Wikipedia and encyclopedias in general. He starts from the times of the first known encyclopedia, which was a bit before 100 AD, and moves on to popular encyclopedias like the Britannica. He then tells about how everyone began converting encyclopedias to data format in order to put them on CD's and on the internet, which inexorably led to the creation of Wikipedia. Andrew Dalby then goes on to discuss why numerous people were (and maybe still are) against the use of Wikipedia and why so many people used it over other encyclopedia programs and software. In particular I found the chapter about why many people did not like Wikipedia to be the most interesting. This chapter of the book brought up a very good argument. Although Wikipedia is a vast resource that encompasses almost anything a person might want to know, maybe people put too much faith in its articles when they should be a bit cautious.
Wikipedia is great source for all kinds of information, but it is far from perfect and I think many people don’t realize this. I’m not going to say that Andrew Dalby makes this argument, as he seems to stick to mainly reporting the facts and other people’s views, but many of the people he talks about definitely feel this way. One of my favorite quotes in this book so far is by Ira Matetsky and he says “The best feature of the site is that anyone can edit virtually anything contained on it. The worst feature of the site is that anyone can edit virtually anything on it” (pg. 50). I think this quote very clearly defines the pros and cons of Wikipedia, because in essence they are the same thing. Wikipedia is very much a double edged sword. Since anyone can edit it, information can be edited and improved over and over until nearly perfect, but on the other hand this makes Wikipedia very vulnerable to vandalism and falsifications. When Wikipedia was first started, people were much more suspicious about it, but as it grew and grew in popularity people seemed to become less and less suspicious. Today it is the most popular and most used resource for information, but it is still just as susceptible to vandalism and false facts as it ever was, maybe even more so now since so many people use it. As it was put in Technopoly by Neil Postman, this source of information is very much adding to the information “glut” that is surrounding American culture. Since Wikipedia almost always is the first link you see when you search for information on google and it’s so easy to use, it seems people are choosing easy and quick access to information over quality of information. Not to say that the information on Wikipedia isn’t quality information as I am sure much of it is, but people are not even second guessing it or considering that it might not be. If it’s on Wikipedia it’s correct, that’s the attitude that our culture seems to be embracing. Personally, 99% of the time the only thing I use Wikipedia for is scientific or mathematical type information, because the way I see it, to be able to write detailed information about scientific theories and facts, a person really needs to know what they are talking about so there is good probability that the information is correct. It’s still not 100% probability though, so if something seems strange to me I would still cross reference it with something known to be correct. I rarely use Wikipedia to look up current events or things of that sort, because you could read and article and learn from it, but then read it again an hour later and it could look completely different. Wikipedia was a great idea and it works very well for many sources of information, but not for everything, and people need to keep that in mind when researching information on it.
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