The Source Wikipedia

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ncaranti/6025606712/sizes/m/in/photostream/



Wikipedia  is considered to be one of the world’s main resource of information in education and news, The article Military History on the Electronic Frontier: Wikipedia Fight the War of 1812 goes on saying “Wikipedia has become the world’s dominant educational resource with over four million articles in the English language edition that reach hundreds of millions of readers”. It is sad to find out that Wikipedia has the possibility of presenting false information where this is due to the fact that users can edit an article and also delete important facts as it is stated in What’s on Wikipedia, and What’s Not…?: Assessing Completeness of Information “Wikipedia’s policy of letting anyone create and edit content causes the information to be inaccurate, misleading, or generally incorrect, both purposefully and accidentally…Still the philosophy of the site is that with so many people looking at the content, in the long run accuracy will prevail”.

I personally lost confident in Wikipedia and being away from school for sometime I did not know that academically speaking it is viewed as non reliable source in other word not a credible website.  One could say that not only finding the source, feeling confident about the source is essential not to all but to the majority of users.

It is clearly stated on What’s on Wikipedia, and What’s Not..?: Assessing Completeness of Information that “Information on Wikipedia is extremely volatile and dynamic.  Articles can change dramatically over time”.  But reading further into the articles assigned by the professor I get confused to the sense that they, Wikipedia, are on the job in fixing the issue quickly as stated by Michael Twidale, Information Scientist at the University of Illinois at Urban-Champaign in the special report Internet encyclopedia go head to head “Wikipedia’s strongest suit is the speed at which it can update”.

It makes me wonder how come people recognize the fact that Wikipedia is not credible source of information and yet it is ranked one of the top ten sites in the world.

Another point to mention is commercializing connections, in the article of Wikinomics and its discontents: a critical analysis of Web 2.0 business manifestos “Commoditizing connections is exactly what facilitators of user-generated content do” therefore users have no say and awareness on the data that is collected by the providers of such platforms, going further “These data are more valuable than the content itself”.  A business factor after all, I thought at the beginning that it was, Wikipedia, as I read ‘non profit-oriented peer production’.  Also in the same article above Google was viewed in the same matter “Google is less interested in co-creation or content than it is in people making connections – connections that yield valuable information about who they are and what they are interested in” it makes me wonder did they have this in mind while making these social platforms?