Wikipedia

I love wikipedia. It's a one-stop shop to find out facts about everything from history to pop culture. It 's perfect as a ready-reference tool, used to answer a simple question. However, rather than using it for legitimate research, I generally use Wikipedia to find a specific piece of minute trivia, more for settling a bet than writing a paper.

And while I read wikipedia articles pretty regularly, I've never contributed, and never thought a whole lot about who was contributing or what that process is like. I had always known that "anyone can update it" and that because of this articles about very current or controversial items tended to be biased or unreliable. But I never realized how much discussion and editing goes into the pages of even the most seemingly mundane topics. During our in class exercise my group was examining an article about welding that was voted one of the best articles, and while it is a subject that one wouldn't think would have much to be updated, there was still a large amount of edits and discussion in the talk and history pages.

I have never felt the need to contribute to a wiki. I've never felt enough of an expert on a subject to create content. However, as wikis become more and more mainstream, expanding past even just wikipedia, perhaps I, and others who don't feel like experts, will feel the ability and desire to participate. Often with wikis I get the feeling that articles are written by one or two contributors. And then with the amount of work and content that these wikipedians put in, what was originally intended to be a community work is ascribed some ownership. When reading through the discussions and edits on different wikipedia pages, I noticed that in any given article there was one or two contributors that deleted other's edits and seemed to take ownership. One of my good friends has developed a wikipedia hobby -- when he is bored, he goes to the wikipedia page for the city that he lives in, and adds a nickname that he and his roommates made up, and sees how long it takes for someone to delete it. It is always deleted within 24 hours, usually much less and never with any discussion. This makes me wonder who is so closely watching the page for Stamford, CT, who considers themselves to be such an expert. How many people are dedicating a large chunk of time to keep up wikis about their passions.

However, the fact that even the most seemingly dull page is so vigilantly monitored, does inspire confidence that what we're reading is actually accurate. But what happens if when you happen to check a page is within the few hours when there is unverified or inaccurate information. In Poe's article from The Atlantic he discusses the community factor and how that affects a wiki's accuracy. There is the possibility that a community could embrace something false as fact and potentially change the truth if enough people belived it. However, that doesn't seem to be happening and the accuracy of wikipedia is only slightly less than established traditional encyclopedias.