Honestly, I can’t remember the internet before Wikipedia existed. When you search for information, facts about people or basically anything, Wikipedia is the first site that comes up in 90 percent of all search engines. Wikipedia is truly revolutionary and a great thing, but has it like Andrew Keen says, gone from a dictatorship of experts to a dictatorship of idiots?
The information on Wikipedia is very flexible. Anybody can go on to the website create a username and password, then start editing or creating. This cannot be a good thing if you want the information to be very credible. This also becomes a hazard when you have pretty biased people writing stuff on the website that expresses a point of view. Wikipedia still finds a way to stay very credible though. With the people who manage it and control the content, there is little information on website that cannot be confirmed as true.
Wikipedia is a tool to get information, but also you cannot know if the information on the site is true. The site therefore becomes a great introductory to your research. You can go on the site find the information and then do further research to check the credibility. The information on Wikipedia is typically condensed and summarized so you cannot always just use it as your source, it is definitely where most start though.
How come the site is never really vandalized or tampered with? There are people that voluntarily work for the website to help prevent this kind of thing. Also there are just people, out of the goodness of their heart, that help and stop these kind of actions and promote the website’s wellbeing. An example of this would be a couple of years ago in one of my classes we were asked to go onto Wikipedia to get some of the study materials for the class. I thought it would be a great idea to log in to my account on Wikipedia and change the information that the class needed so I was the only one with the accurate readings. This plan seemed to work great. I deleted a whole paragraph from the text and wrote something completely absurd. Well, as it turns out it only took Wikipedia two hours to ban my account and another four or five hours to fix the damage I had done. Not so great in the end for me considering I lost my account and everyone still got the information.
The site is not just for idiots, everybody is collectively involved and it is great that everyone can share information and add to it vital facts that may have been left out. I do not see it so much as a shift from dictatorship to dictatorship, but more of a shift from dictatorship to democracy. With Wikipedia everybody can share facts and information and it can definitely be the truth. We do not always have to trust the experts to provide us with all the information we need. We get a more social and diverse aspect out of Wikipedia and there are plenty of things that the experts do not know that somebody who has experienced it firsthand will know better.
The example vividly depicts the concept of collective intelligence and how people try hard to make Wikipedia a better information source even if it is often labeled as 'unreliable'. I agree that Wikipedia is used because there is so much diversity. Probably ellaborating on the last two sentences will provide a stronger argument?
ReplyDeleteI thought you had a great argument about the strength of wikipedia through collaboration. Unlike Keen's argument of how badly wikipedia is for the culture, you show why it works so well. The different viewpoints are a great way to really strengthen an article, but they need to be proven legitimate first.
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