For this week's entry I will be examining the first half of Andrew Dalby's "The World and Wikipedia: How We Are Editing Reality". Dalby uses this book in order to discuss the history of the popular online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. He also discusses the many pro's and con's associated with an encyclopedia that is free to use but allows all people to edit the information on the page. As a current student, I have obviously used Wikipedia countless times. It is a source that I know may be unreliable, but truly is a great starting point if no prior knowledge of the subject is known. For me, it is a great place to learn the "basics" before I engulf myself into more serious research. I was excited to read this book before I began based on my usage of Wikipedia and Dalby did not disappoint as he creates a good read for all while discussing Wikipedia.
Dalby begins with two examples that are indicative of the main pro's and con's of Wikipedia. The first is a story about an Earthquake in Chile. This earthquake had a wikipedia page within an hour. Soon after more and more people and good sources contributed to the page and therefore a comprehensive article came to be. This article eventually had statistics, data, and other pertinent information making it a great source of information for free, and took much less time than printing an article in an actual encyclopedia. Dalby uses this example to show that Wikipedia can be a good source of information because of the ease that the internet provides.
On the other hand, Dalby provides the example of the user Keykingz13. This user set up his account and began editing and contributing information on pages that he knew nothing about. This shows the main problem with Wikipedia; there is no set of credentials needed in order to contribute information. Anyone, anywhere can edit information. The good information can be deleted and the bad can be entered and this poses a serious problem for reliability of the encyclopedia.
Dalby uses the quote by Carr to say that, "Wikipedia is...praised as 'a glorious manifestation of the age of participation' that allows us 'to pool our individual brains into a great collective mind'" (54-55). I found this extremely interesting because one would immediately think that this would lead to opinionated people or just crazy people from posting their own information. However, it would be untrue to say that Wikipedia is "ruined" by some people. In fact much of the information is correct across Wikipedia. One thing that Dalby says that I believe explains the fact that people aren't destroying Wikipedia is that "the quest for communal knowledge seems to have prevailed so far over any attempt to pit individual opinions against one another" (50-51). This is a very bold statement. Essentially Dalby is saying that people would rather create a great source of information to share than to bicker and destroy it. I believe this is true and that millions of people find Wikipedia so useful that many won't go out of their way to ruin it.
Chapter four was titled "Why You Use It" and Dalby explains that often, even without a commercial motive, "Main search engines, like Google and Yahoo... systematically place Wikipedia pages at the top of their responses for nearly every enquiry" (83). Obviously if someone wanted to do true academic research they would be in a library using books or using a scholarly site such as Ebsco or another article based site. Likely, the average research done through Google or Yahoo is by a novice who is just seeking basic knowledge (or enough to finish a last minute paper). Dalby explains that the pages come up on the first page because they have links to to other pages, are linked to by other pages, and finally pages that are visited most frequently come up the most. The combination of these three things creates a situation where Wikipedia is often at the top of the search results.
I believe that people use Wikipedia so often simply because of the ease of it. You don't have to go to a library, and you don't have to pay for it. It comes up at the top of the search results and therefore it is readily accessible and constantly in your face when looking for information. Wikipedia has evolved from an "interesting experiment" (50) to the giant that it has become today. It didn't happen overnight, but it certainly seems like it did due to the quick growth of the website. Wikipedia, although not entirely reliable provides a great base for starting to learn about something. While teachers and professors discuss whether or not Wikipedia is a reliable source, (even Wikipedia does not consider themselves a reliable source based on their definition), they often decide it is not an acceptable academic source. However I think it is great that there is a website that allows all of us to combine our brain power and knowledge. Wikipedia is enormous as it is today and I can only imagine the plethora of information that will be on it in the future. Dalby does a great job explaining the pro's and con's of Wikipedia throughout the first half of this book.
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