Wikiality

Our new unit is about "wikiality", and this new form of websites wikis are. Wikis are websites that can be edited by anyone. They were created by an individual who might have put up some content, but mostly information is added by people using it. Anyone can click a page, on dinosaurs for example, and add information by simply clicking an "edit" link. They're a very convenient way of finding information as the text is usually clear and simple to read, and because of their nature they are regularly updated. As time goes, there are more and more wikis, usually FAQs for websites.

But the most famous out there is by far Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. This huge website contains tons of information on the most various topics, and is written just like an encyclopedia. There's always a large debate on whether or not it is a reliable source that can be used for school work. Wikis can be edited by absolutely anyone, so people are often afraid that the information you find on them might be wrong. It's true that any internaut out there could write a new page on Wikipedia without having any knowledge of what they're writing about, and give you false information for your research. But a study demonstrated that the percentage of errors on Wikipedia was the same as that of the Encyclopedia Britannica, considered to be one of the most reliable encyclopedias out there! So...can it be used as a reliable source?

This is what we will be trying to decide throughout our new unit, by examining various Wikipedia pages looking for mistakes on them - and correcting those mistakes to make Wikipedia a better resource. All the while, we will be able to evaluate how many errors really are on Wikipedia and how often they are corrected, to make our own opinion on whether or not wikis are a reliable source. The way we view information is changing as fast as the Internet is changing, and Wikipedia is most likely going to be an important part of our future, so it is important we find out more about the way it works. We can then help build a better, more reliable internet, and a more convenient way of sharing information.

"Wikipedia Logo."NFJAW. Wordpress. 2007. 02 Feb 2009