Wikipedia
May 21, 2009 at 4:14 am 1 comment
History assessment 2: Report on the escape of POW William Mudge in WWII.
We didn’t know much about World War II, we knew hardly anything about William Mudge, we knew nothing of his escape. We googled it. The first hit that came up was Wikipedia. Wikipedia told us exactly what happened in the escape of POW William Mudge in WWII in easy to understand terms and a language that we understood. We moved onto the sources referenced in the Wikipedia article, now armed with a knowledge as to what we were talking about, and were therefore able to write a succinct and knowledgeable report. We never told anybody that we looked at Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that is traditionally discredited as an academically reliable source. I however, with adamant support from Axel Bruns, disagree. Wikipedia is a podium that allows instantaneous access to millions of articles (there are currently over 2.8 million English Wikipedia articles available) with legitimate sources and people forever sifting through to find discrepancies.
Any person can edit or add to a Wikipedia article, there are however, some standards that must be abided by to help keep the articles academic and true. These points are:
- Neutral point of view
- Verifiability
- No original research
- Naming conventions
- Civility
- Harassment; no legal threats
- Consensus
This success of Wikipedia can be measured against its predecessor Nupedia. Nupedia only allowed previously published academic articles on the site, at the end of the first 18 months of the online encyclopedia, only 12 articles had been published. Perhaps this is due to Nupedia failing to recognize that society has the ability to produce useful and intellectual content. Wikipedia realized this ability and has exceeded all limits.
Wikipedia in the midst of Web 2.0 has remedied the main failing of traditional encyclopedias. As time changes and history is made every day, Wikipedia is changed, added to and edited every day, it is in the state of constant flux. What is true now may not be true tomorrow.
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n6905633 | May 25, 2009 at 7:21 am
I really like your writing style, it was interesting and casual, but you can tell you have done you research. I also liked how you started off with your own experiances with Wikipedia [I did that for every history assignment as well].
As you say Wikipedia is constantly updated, refined and re-examined so why were our teachers so against it? I will never know! I agree you shouldn’t use Wikipedia as your sole source for everything, but why not use it as part of a collection of resources? Especially if you have information to support it.
At the very least it helps us understand the basic concept about whatever topic we are writing about. How is that a bad?
I have already written all my propper comments for the assignment so I shall end this one with:
HOORAY FOR COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE!