Wikipedia - Part One

Wikipedia is currently our generation's main reference for information on anything and everything. It has become the new form of the Encyclopedia and the use of actual encyclopedia books is almost non-existent. The need for knowledge and information has always been around. Books and manuscripts have told us so many interesting facts and have provided us with so much information about so many different things. As we look as history, we see that even the earliest forms of organized and logical information were made available to anyone who could read. Andrew Dalby's book,"The World and Wikipedia," discusses that the first person to establish a "full circle of knowledge" (20) was Pliny the Elder, who scribbled notes and took in information from books that he read throughout most of his lifetime. He was essentially the first one to create an encyclopaedia, which generated a wealth of information to readers everywhere. He used this term, encyclopaedia, as a way "to explain his purpose, which was to offer a full circle of learning, a complete system of knowledge laid out in a logical pattern," (21). His successors were also significant because they added great amounts of information and logistics to the wealth of knowledge that was being formed, including facts about law, science, archeology, art and so forth. The three main books that were used to eventually establish Wikipedia were the encyclopdeia, the dictionary and the sourcebook. This eventually led to the Britannica Encyclopedia, first as a collection of books, then to CD-ROM, which could be used on computers.
The problem lies in the updates of information. Everyday, events occurs marking a moment in time where something should be recorded. History happens everyday, so how is a CD or a book able to keep up-to-date information readily available? They're not. Then came the introduction to The Wikipedia, the world's first online encyclopedia databse, where thousands of articles could be submitted and revised for everyone's viewing. This website was also open to the public for anyone's input, editing and information. The website grew so quickly that between its launch in January 2001 and March 2009, Wikipedia reached over 2,800,000 articles (39). Wikipedia also developed millions of articles in over 250 different languages (42). "An encyclopedia that is actively growing in nearly all these languages ia an unprecedented and matchless resource for the multilingual world in which we live, a resoucre that no one in the world would have dreamed of until, about ten years ago, Jimmy Wales dreamed of it," (49).
The question is then about quality, not quantity. One of the best and worst features of Wikipedia is that anyone is able to go on and add, edit or delete information, which raises the question: How accurate is the information on Wikipedia? "It differed from conventional encyclopedias, however, in that each page was a work in progress," (52), which proves that the never-ending information will constantly be edited and revised and updated again and again.  For example, the Seigenthaler case described in Dalby's book is a classic example of how Wikipedia can be toyed with and false information can easily be added and posted for readers to believe. Uncredited information and vandalism are significant ways that Wikipedia is arguably unreliable. There is also the argument on the Neutral Point of View (NPOV) as discussed by Dalby, and how exactly a "point of view" is neutral when it is obvisouly someone's view. "Individually, however, it's hard for an editor (or anyone else) to distinguish correctly between 'my viewpoint' and 'a neutral viewpoint'," (79). Wikipedia tried to maintain having a NPOV within their articles, yet it seems merely impossible to do so because everyone has their own opinions. If Wikipedia allows anyone and everyone to input information, there is always going to be people who are left-winged, right-winged and everywhere in between putting their two sense into an article, which ultimately makes an article bias.
Although Wikipedia's sources and credits may not be 100% reliable, it still encountered the "Google effct," which helped Google and Wikipedia's popularity. Wikipedia is usually the first website that Google suggests as a reliant source for anything you search. It's always at the top of the list of webpages. According to Dalby, "Favouring Wikipedia was the simplest way to ensure that the average Google results page would looks useful," (86). Since this is the case, we as web surfers are almost always going to click on the first website that Google reccomends because that website will have the most abundant and accurate information...or so we think. But why wouldn't we use Wikipedia? It is free after all. There is no annoying advertising. There are no "free trials" or subscriptions. It is just there, full of (unreliable, opinionated) information and ready for our access. So although we tend to use Wikipedia more than we should, we have to ask ourselves whether or not the information can be legitimately used for academic research and whether or not we should go back to using a more reliable source of information, like, hmmm....encyclopedia books? This generation? Yea right.