California Conservative

Wikipedia is an online “encylopedia” that consists of nearly 1 million articles. What many don’t know is that Wikiedia has been, in large part, created by users. What?

If you visit the Wikipedia main page, you’ll find this:

Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. In this English version, started in 2001, we are currently working on 914,863 articles.

Don’t be afraid to edit articles—anyone can edit, and we encourage you to be bold (but please don’t vandalize)!

But…isn’t Wikipedia a real encylopedia full of nothing less that fact? Apparently not.

Lance Ulanoff says of his investigation into Wikipedia:

It has information on virtually any topic you can imagine, and —here’s where it gets interesting — if it doesn’t and you know something about the topic, you can create the first entry (as long as you become a site member) and basically define that subject for the Wikipedia visitors.

Moreover, each article or record is not frozen in time. Instead, it can be added to and edited by other Wikipedia visitors — that is the very definition of a “wiki.” The premise is that working together, we can create an accurate online encyclopedic reference.

And here’s a snafu that resulted of editing in Wikipedia:

A man who posted false information on an online encyclopedia linking a prominent journalist to the Kennedy assassinations says he was playing a trick on a co-worker.

Brian Chase, 38, ended up resigning from his job and apologizing to John Seigenthaler Sr., the former publisher of the Tennessean newspaper and founding editorial director of USA Today.

Chase said he didn’t know the free Internet encyclopedia called Wikipedia was used as a serious reference tool.

And even this:

Wikipedia lets users create, change and even erase articles on any topic, regardless of their expertise.

Supporters say its open, collaborative nature leads to a more complete, bias-free reference source, though when the topic is controversial the wiki entry can resemble a battlefield.

All this makes a lot of sense. It explains the the disclosure on such topics as the Iraq War, “The nuetrality of this article is under dispute.” It is often non-Conservatives who quote from Winipedia as if it were an authoritative source.

Who knew?

Cross-posted at Amy’s Blog

This entry was posted on Friday, January 13th, 2006 at 12:29 pm and is filed under Author: Amy Proctor, Culture, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.