The Wikipedia (2001- ) is an encyclopedia on the Web that is completely written and edited by its readers. Readers are free to write whatever they want about any subject under the sun. The only real guideline is the “neutral point of view” rule. Since late 2005, however, most changes have been rejected. Well, most of mine at least.
The Wikipedia started in 2001 and already it is the largest encyclopedia in the English-speaking world with over a million articles. The Wikipedia exists in other languages too, but with far fewer articles.
The Wikipedia is free: anyone can read it for free. On the other hand, anyone who writes or edits the Wikipedia is also doing it for free. For the same reason it cannot use copyrighted material.
You would think the thing would be a complete disaster, but somehow it works. For every evil-minded person who wants to ruin the Wikipedia, there are ten others who want to see it succeed and will fix it. The Wikipedia is set up so that it is easy to undo any change. No one can cause any lasting harm to it. For example, you can write “the moon is made of green cheese” in the Moon article. Within minutes your change will be gone.
The Wikipedia is built the same way Linux was: on the Internet by many hands from all over the world. This was why those who started the Wikipedia thought it would work.
But there is an important difference between these two: to work on Linux you need to be very good and very experienced in computer programming. To work on the Wikipedia you just need to know how to write.
The science magazine Nature took some science articles from both the Britannica and the Wikipedia and asked experts to count the errors in each. The Britannica had fewer errors – no surprise there – but the Wikipedia was not that much worse. The Britannica strongly disputes this, showing how the results were interpreted to favour the Wikipedia.
But fact checking, it turns out, is one of the Wikipedia’s strengths.
What it is not so good at is writing and editing. After all, checking a fact is much easier than editing. Just look at what a fact checker gets paid at a magazine compared to the editor. So articles tend to be long-winded and badly written. Clear, forceful writing gets watered down or removed.
Bad writing is harder to understand. It also makes it harder to find key facts. Articles are much longer than they should be. A good editor would fix all that.
Another bad influence: the Britannica. Most Wikipedians grew up with the Britannica as their idea of what an encyclopedia should be. But the long articles and long-winded prose of the Britannica do not work on the Web. Wikipedia articles are nowhere near as bad, but many are still too long and too long-winded for the Web, good writing or no.
See also:
- Wikipedia.com
- neutral point of view
- encyclopedia
- Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Wikipedia Review – a website that is against the Wikipedia
- The criticism of Lir – what is wrong with the Wikipedia
- web design
- The Web
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