Two men named Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales created Wikipedia “the Free Encyclopedia” in 2001. Wikipedia was an online free encyclopedia because in the past encyclopedias like the Britannica Encyclopedia were only available and you had to pay to use them. Wikipedia works by having anyone create or add information onto a page. So thousands of people edit and create pages every day. This is the main concern a lot of people share when it comes to Wikipedia. Is it really that reliable? There have been instances in the past where information has been downright wrong so why should someone trust it? There are committees of people who go onto all of the pages and edit them to make sure they are right. These people are often called noble amateurs.
In his article The Nobel Amateur, Andrew Keens talks a lot about how he feel about these so-called “noble amateurs”. He describes them as "A hobbyist, knowledgeable or otherwise someone who does not make a living from his or her field of interest". Keen feels as though since these people are not professionals that they have no right to share information told as fact on the Internet.
Wikipedia really isn’t all junk. If you go to the bottom of basically all the Wikipedia pages you can see list of references that the page was quoted or built off of. So if you don’t believe Wikipedia you can check out what that page has to say about your topic of Internet. Because it has been around for so long, pages have been built upon and built upon over the past ten years. That means that the probability that there is an error in the page has become very, very, very slim. This is probably why Wikipedia is 17th most visited site, while Encyclopedia Britannica is 5,128th (Andrew Keen). I know for a fact that I have seen a Wikipedia page vandalized. Only about ten minutes later, it was quickly fixed and that was probably seven years ago when I last saw a majorly vandalized page. Wikipedia is no longer vandalized as much as it used to be because people are starting to respect Wikipedia as a more credible source of information.
I think that Wikipedia is a good resource for students and anyone looking for research. While it does have some flaws, over time they will be most likely smoothed out. And without those noble amateurs we would not have access to a vast amount of free information. If we didn’t have Wikipedia, we all probably would have to pay for Britannica Encyclopedia at one point or another.
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