Sharing knowledge is a dialogue; it’s not a one-way street where one is only sharing information and one is receiving. As a result, as the “World Knowledge Advisor” I have chosen Wikipedia to be our encyclopedia from here on out.
Photo Courtesy of Wikipedia.com
Since 2001, Wikipedia has become the world famous “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia). Although there have been numerous controversies and fights over the accuracy of Wikipedia, Wikipedia has built a strong and intelligent community that confirm/check information. Wikipedia only has one worker, the software developer, while the editors and checkers are all volunteers. Giving up one’s free time shows that these people want to provide this information to the world; they’re not selfish or in it for the money, but rather for the knowledge of all human beings.
Wikipedia provides free access to all of human knowledge, ultimately providing free knowledge to anyone on anything. No fees or hidden costs- just knowledge. Furthermore it provides a neutral point of view. Since the writers and editors of Wikipedia are everyday people just like you and me, they provide both sides of a story, while a for-profit encyclopedia company may edit or revise articles or sides of a story in order to keep shareholders happy.
The information shared on Wikipedia goes through a number of quality tests. Frequent users of Wikipedia have created a small community of 600-1,000 persons that do a bulk of the editing and fact checking on Wikipedia. In addition, only 18% of the edits made on Wikipedia pages are by anonymous users. To create a Wikipedia page, one must create a username and page; once a username is created one can provide as much or as little personal background. In randomly looking at some usernames, I came across numerous academic professor and professionals who are professionals in their field. One user, POL089, states on his/her personal page, “I do my best to make contributions that are true, relevant, and impartial, and sometimes to rewrite paragraphs in a better way. My rewrites don't often get reverted or changed radically, so presumably they are considered an improvement” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pol098). Most, if not all, users edit Wikipedia pages to improve the information, rather than hurt it.
Wikipedia is the better encyclopedia because it is a “a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia). It doesn’t require one to be a professional in a field or have a M.D. or P.h.D. after his or her name, because sometimes professionals don’t always know everything. As a collaborative encyclopedia, Wikipedia allows people from a variety of backgrounds to come together to share knowledge and information with the rest of the world. It starts a dialogue about a specific topic and encourages the rest of the world to part-take in this dialogue. As a multilingual encyclopedia, Wikipedia is not an exclusive encyclopedia; one does not need to know English to understand the text. Articles in Spanish, Dutch, French, Portuguese and Chinese are just the beginning of Wikipedia’s multilingual text.
Just as in the classroom where discussion is as important, if not more important than a lecture, the free, collaborative and multilingual dialogue that Wikipedia creates and encourages is more important than the typical and standard Encyclopaedia Brittanica.
No comments:
Post a Comment