In chapter’s 5-8 of “The World and Wikipedia” the author makes more valid arguments in my opinion. In chapter 5 he talks about why our society loves something like Wikipedia so much even though it is not even necessarily accurate. There are a few arguments that the author makes in this chapter, the one that really sparked my attention was when he talks about Wikipedia forming a militia in case some kind of emergency happens then they can keep it running. This refers to the “virtual nation” of Wikipedia. The author states that “Spoke of us as ‘the people’ then corrected himself to ‘the community’.” Pg. (120). This is CRAZY to me that this Wikipedia world could actually have a militia. Our country had militia’s way before real laws and such were formed in the 1800’s and before that. If these virtual worlds are just starting to form militias then I can only imagine how far they are going to come before they actually have armed forces! One argument that I do disagree with that the author makes is that everyone is equal through Wikipedia. If someone is known for posting great articles and is a prime contributor through the site then he will be on a higher status than someone who is writing false information.
In chapter 6 the book discusses the chaos that Wikipedia can cause. The author discusses that people can have false biographies on Wikipedia. With this can come bad reputations and such. I believe this to be a dumb argument against Wikipedia for many reasons. Any person can put false information out there about you as a person; this is just one of the sites that allow it to happen. This is something that people have to deal with in our culture of technology today. You can’t do anything about it because there is far too many ways to do it. This is just one of the many ways that technology is affecting our culture today. The author states “For some, no doubt, and publicity is good publicity” (Pg. 165). I found this quote to be very true by the author because it is very true. This leads to a huge problem with Wikipedia because people can right about themselves or others with their sole purpose to get publicity.
Chapter 7 discusses why people do not trust Wikipedia. Mirroring Wikipedia is one of the reason why people don’t trust Wikipedia and the fact that anyone can post just about anything. People can’t cite Wikipedia as a reliable source so it is tough to trust a source that when you say you got it from Wikipedia it is frowned upon by professors and teachers. The author states “Anonymous and unsourced edits will be made.” (pg. 195). This is the biggest reason why I can say that people don’t trust Wikipedia. This to me is like trusting anyone because if it is unsourced then you might as well have heard it from someone that is completely uncredible. This to me is like gossip and the American culture loves to gossip and Wikipedia makes it very easy to do so in front of a huge audience.
Chapter 8 goes into discussing why people will trust Wikipedia. The first argument that I found so apparent in our culture today is the ‘no censorship’ rule with Wikipedia. The author states “complained that too much Nazi symbolism was visible” (Pg. 198). With a site like this it does not censor out any details, you are going to get all the blood guts and gore of what happened in a certain situation. This is what our culture loves and this technology allows it to be done even easier. This also connects back to people craving the most up to date information and if Wikipedia is providing it in the quickest manner then people are going to put some trust in it. I know in my personal experiences with Wikipedia, I follow soccer around the world and the most recent trades are always posted on Wikipedia before they are publicized. I can honestly say that these for the most part are pretty accurate so I have trust they are going to provide me with pretty legit information; clearly this is true with a large portion of other people in our technologically bound country.
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