Wikipedia

I have talked about Wikipedia previously, but this week I’m going to go a bit more in depth.

Wikipedia was first launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales (at the bottom of this page) and Larry Sanger. Since then it has now become the most popular general reference work on the web. The name Wikipedia is derived from the Hawaiian word for fast, wiki, and encyclopaedia. It now has 12 million articles, 2,770,000 of which are in English. It was originally meant to fuel the website Nupedia, but this site quickly failed and Wikipedia number one. If you would like some more information on Wikipedia, try Wikipedia’s page on it. The Wikipedia logo is below.

However there is a lot of vandalism on Wikipedia. Although usually Wikipedia can filter out obvious vandalism in seconds, it may take a lot longer to find less obvious vandalism, such as deliberate mistakes on particular topics. Some pages have been vandalised so much that Wikipedia has locked them, meaning that no one can edit them anymore. This subtler vandalism means that many questions are raise on the reliability of the source.

One way, and a much advised way of checking if something is reliable is to check the references at the bottom of the page. If there are references, this usually means that the source is reliable. However it is not good enough to check if there are references. By clicking the hyperlink, you may check where the author(s) have gotten information from.

You can also check using your own knowledge. If you know, for example, that William Shakespeare was in fact baptised on the 26th of April, and no the 23rd of April, you know that this source should not be trusted completely and that you should look for an alternative source for finding out information.

However not all Wikipedia pages that aren’t vandalised are reliable. Something else you should check is the date that the wiki was last edited, because it may have been outdated. For example, Beyoncé’s page on Wikipedia was last updated 15th February 2009, which means that it doesn’t mention anything about her latest song ‘Still in Love’. You can check the update history of a page by clicking the tab named ‘history’ at the top of the page.

But now turning to the scale of Wikipedia. Clay Shirky tells us in his book Here Comes Everybody that less than 2% of all Wikipedia users contribute. Out of this 2%, very few make large contributions. In fact about 200 users have made 100 or over contributions. The second most active user contributes only half the amount of the most active user, and the tenth most active user contributes a tenth. This shows that without the top ten contributors, Wikipedia would quickly become useless.

And so to conclude Wikipedia is incredibly successful. It has had over 2,800,000 articles and raised £6,000,000 last year. Vandalism is an issue that the few Wikipedia staff are working on. However most of Wikipedia is left to the volunteers who help contribute to Wikipedia. If you help to contribute to Wikipedia, it will help fuel it for longer.