According to Wikipedia...
Taken from wikipedia.com, Wikipedia is a "Web-based free-content multilingual encyclopedia project. It exists as a wiki, a website that allows any visitor to freely edit its content." Stephen Colbert possibly said it better, saying that Wikipedia is what you get when you bring democracy to facts.Wikipedia is the quintessential result of Web 2.0 - a vast, interconnected web of information that is changed through user-input. The number of terms it covers is staggering, and I would be pretty hard-pressed to find some thing or concept that does not have its own entry.
Obviously, we've had encyclopedia's for a while now. We've even had computer encyclopedias for well over a decade or two, courtesy of Encarta. So what's really the advantage of Wikipedia? First of all, it's practically real-time. Thailand's military staged a coup successfully today, and you can bet a hundred people logged on the second it was announced to update the Wikipedia entry. Yep, and here it is.
Another huge advantage are all those lovely links that accompany every entry. Go to almost any entry, and every key word associated with that has a link to its own entry. And every one of those entries will have links that go to other entries, and so on and so on until you've seen virtually (virtually seen?) all of mankind's collective knowledge.
And what's the drawback to this magical wellspring of knowledge? Well, I suppose that depends on how much you trust random strangers. The theory goes that there are "experts" all across the internet on very specific things, and Wikipedia is a way of channelling their collective knowledge instead of hiring a small pool of "official" experts, like a real encyclopedia would. Take that as you will, but a lot of people take that to mean unreliable.
To be fair, their filter guys who constantly check every minute change are quicker than you might think. There has also been at least one study that shows Wikipedia to be no less accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica on a random selection of science articles. So while the information is probably good overall, I wouldn't cite it in your doctoral dissertation if I were you.
So where does it evolve from here? A quick glance at the main page shows a bunch of new directions, from a dictionary and thesaurus to an entire news page. It is becoming easier and easier to edit and store any kind of information. The internet's collected wisdom is becoming more and more centralized and is highly accessible to anybody now. You could probably write a book on the implications of all this. You could certainly write a good Wikipedia article, at least.
posted by tromano @ 10:29 PM
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