In the book “The World and Wikipedia” written by Andrew Dalby it discusses a lot of interesting pg’s 7-113. In chapter one it talks about many different “wikipedians” (people who edit Wikipedia articles) writing about different articles. A quote that I pulled from chapter 1 states as follows “Wikipedia is just like the real world” (pg. 14). I found this quote more interesting as I continued to read the chapter and read about the different rules and regulations of Wikipedia that it discusses that I actually referred to as laws for this “world” of Wikipedia. I find it fascinating that as a culture we are literally creating worlds within our own through technology. Wikipedia is one of the many worlds that we are creating; some other examples could be face book or MySpace. All of these are run with rules or laws that regulate them and they are their own world.
In chapter 2 how Wikipedia formed over the years. Encyclopedias started as books and slowly the goal was to eliminate print for a couple reasons. With books came bigger and bigger books which was much more money to produce. Also books made it not time efficient because this required people to flip through thousand page books which was far too time consuming for our time hungry American culture. They also had to revise these books which were difficult because it made it hard to keep facts up to date. As print was eliminated there came CD-ROM encyclopedias that you could by on a disk and slowly arose the idea of Wikipedia in January of 2001. Wikipedia was the idea that anyone could go on and edit a page. The success of Wikipedia skyrocketed and Wikipedia blew up completely. It even started writing articles in all other languages. In chapter 2 the author states “The growth from about 20 languages in late 2002, to 250 by the end of 2006, was perhaps to rapid” (pg. 44). This quote stuck out to me because I found it so interesting that like technology in this country is growing so rapidly that we can barely keep up with it and write laws for it, so is the websites like this that we can barely keep up with the world of Wikipedia. It is almost like our culture is overwhelmed in so many ways with not only technology, but keeping up with Wikipedia advancements and things of this sort.
Chapter 3 talks about why critics and people of this sort don’t believe Wikipedia to be such a good thing. Reasons such as it has a track record for providing false information to its visitors and the fact that anyone can go on a page and write whatever they want to write. The author states “everyone is an encyclopedist” (pg. 71). Chapter 3 discusses this as one of the issues with this kind of encyclopedia using the idea of collective knowledge. This makes me really worry about the future of technology in this country because if anyone can be an ecyclopedist with absolutely no credentials then who’s to say that we won’t start having engineers and doctors with no credentials start breaking their way into these fields. This is another reason that our rapid development of these worlds within worlds scares me so much.
Chapter 4 discusses with its readers why we use Wikipedia even if we know that it may not be as accurate as we want. The author makes a very valid argument in my opinion, he states “...Are now fated to click on the Wikipedia link almost every time.” (pg. 86). He is referring to the Google effect. With Google being the most popular search engine in the world it is almost impossible to dodge Wikipedia in any search you decide to go on in a particular topic. I believe that Google putting Wikipedia at the top of every search that someone does has a huge impact as to why people use it. Another argument he makes is that people use it because they want news quicker than it is already provided. The author states “who got the news and put it on Wikipedia so quickly was never clear.” (pg. 96). People are always hungry for the latest news and because Wikipedia can provide them with a brief synopsis of the latest news people are always going to use it. This is the mind set of most people in our country that they want the latest information and gossip as soon as they can get it, and now that this technology can provide it to them they are certainly going to take advantage.
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