Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia that can be used and edited by anyone. While Wikipedia can be a great source to just read for fun it can never be trusted unless the facts are verified from elsewhere. While all of my teachers in college have informed me to never use Wikipedia as a resource I never fully understood why, until now. Wikipedia has been known for getting edited by politicians, church groups, and even big corporations to enhance their image. While the person who invented Wikipedia had a great idea behind it, it just didn’t quite work out. The idea of having a collaborative source for subjects would be amazing if you could actually trust everyone.
A college student named Virgil Griffith created a program to scan Wikipedia in order to tell who is editing posts. It traces the edit back to the computer to let you know where it is coming from. Therefore, if you are reading about a corporation and you see an edit by that corporation you know that it is not reliable. While this helps the source out a little bit it does not eliminate this issue because anyone could just go to different computer (in say a coffee house) and edit again. While this Wiki scanner does help the source become a little bit more reliable, Wikipedia should still never be used as a source for anything factual.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment