After reading Andrew Dalby's, the World and Wikipedia, I had major flashbacks to my youth of using Encarta and Britannica CDs on my old school computer. I distinctly remember doing a research project when I was younger, and in order to find the information I was looking for, I had to insert the second CD into the computer. It was a whole process to find information and it took lots of patience to find what you needed to find. Now, any and all information is right there at your fingertips. While reading this book, I got very curious about some of the articles I was reading from Wikipedia, so I typed in the title of the page on wikipedia.org and instantaneously it was there in front of me, as opposed to years ago, where I'd have to go find the correct volume of the encyclopedia it was in. In the first chapter, I learned how easy it was to alter a wikipedia article and how fast articles pop up after a new event has occurred. Taking their first example of the volcano, it is amazing to think that now within a day, people all around the world with a computer can read an encyclopedia article on something that happened that day. This didn't happen back in the days of print encyclopedias, because it was costly to keep reprinting, and realistically, you can't reprint a series of books everyday and keep selling them. Information started to get outdated, and people wouldn't know which statistics had changed and which were still the same. Today, articles can be changed at any moment, from any computer by anybody, which just shows you how connected we really are to each other through web 2.0.
In Chapter 3 it talks about how the best and worst feature of Wikipedia is the fact that anyone can edit it. By letting anyone edit this resource, you are collaborating with the entire world, using everyones knowledge as opposed to one mans research leading up to an encyclopedia. But, at the same time, this editing can go horrible wrong and people do abuse it, just to mess with the site. The problem is the unreliability then, because if you happen to check an article right after someone has messed with it, you would really have no idea, and the chances that you're going to check back on the article everyday for the next week is unrealistic so you only see the one wrong informational piece. I think it is a slippery slope, and it's hard to trust the site since you really don't know if it's 100% correct. The citations can be helpful, especially in leading you to another webpage, or even to a book where you can read the information for yourself. This leads to Chapter 4 talking about why we use Wikipedia and how students use it. As students of this generation we are used to Wikipedia, and it is comfortable for us to find things on there. It also is one of the first things that pop up when you search something in google. These two factors make it a highly used resource, but teachers are not keen on the idea of using Wikipedia as a resource, because of its unreliability. One of my favorite quotes from this chapter is, "Wikipedia represents all that is great and all that is dangerous about the internet." pg 103. The information is fast, and instantaneous for us now, so we are very tempted to just take what we read there and believe it completely, but as this says, this is a danger.
I think this technology has changed the way we view information, and information keeping. Information about almost anything can be found on Wikipedia, because people from all over the world contribute to it. The vast languages that Wikipedia can be found in is also incredible, and the Wikipedians who dedicate their time to researching and changing the site are changing the way we live. I'm excited to continue reading this book, and learning even more about this ever-changing encyclopedia.
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