Can you believe anything anymore? I'm starting to wonder this myself. I open
the paper and see accusations flung about everyone from Michael Jackson, the
king of pop, to Arnold Schwarzenegger, the kindergarten cop. Are they innocent?
Are they guilty? Are they both aliens from a different planet anyway?
Amazingly enough, there is a place on the Web that you are GUARANTEED to find
actual facts about many different items. And when I say guarantee, I don't
mean it like, "I guarantee you will enjoy this lifetime supply of shark
cartilage because it is sure to cure all diseases and add 39 years to your
life ... or your money back!"
The Wikipedia, as listed on its homepage, is "a multilingual project
to create a complete and accurate free content encyclopedia." Started
in January 2001, the Wikipedia is closing in on 200,000 articles in the English
version, with 154 other translations in the works as well. The pages contain
information that any encyclopedia would contain: facts about important events,
people, places, etc. Users gather the information and add, edit and delete
to the material that already exists on the site.
Users are not simply people who work for Wikimedia Foundation, which is the
non-profit organization of Wikipedia and similar projects. Users are any visitor
to the site. That's right, you can create your own page or edit any existing
page. For instance, you could mention on the Michael
Jackson page that you were one of the extras in "Thriller" video,
or you could write that Arnold
Schwarzenegger is actually your twin and not Danny DeVito's. Unfortunately,
your information will not stay on the site long because there are many other
users who monitor the site hourly, watching their favorite pages to make sure
factual items stay intact and fiction is removed. Each page even has a page
history link, so an individual can view all changes made, and the system has
the ability to email users when their favorite pages are edited.
From this setup, bias is relatively non-existent within the Wikipedia. People
cannot praise one side and scorn the other, which leaves us with the facts
and well-documented opinions by large groups, not by individuals. For instance,
compare the entries for President
George W. Bush and former president Bill
Clinton. Both have plenty of bad and good things listed. Actually,
Bush has far more written about his tenure, largely due to the fact that the
site wasn't even around for most of the Clinton years, and also because the
current president is usually more noteworthy than the previous. This would
change only if Clinton, George Bush Sr., Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter started
a boy band called the WH Boyz, which obviously would perform on tour with Michael.
While most of the information within the Wikipedia is extremely useful --
the main segments are broken out into the categories of Mathematical and Natural
Sciences, Applied Arts and Sciences, Social Sciences and Philosophy, Culture
and Fine Arts and Other Category Schemes -- some of it isn't. When users find
material not necessarily suited for inclusion, they have the ability to post
the page for cleanup, vote
for deletion or even list a user within the vandalism
section. It's easy to find the newest pages and most recently edited ones,
so with all the people on the site, they can keep it intact fairly well. It
appears the users are in the process of voting whether or not to keep the entry
for aglet, so if you have any strong feelings about it, voice your opinion!
If the Wikipedia continues to grow at its current rate, it's feasible that
it could replace those encyclopedias that exist on the shelves on all university
libraries. There's also a mention on the site that a CD-ROM of the Wikipedia
could be available in the near future. I'm not sure if there will be a printed
version, but if there is, you might want to clear off a couple of bookshelves
for it. To make matters worse, the WH Boyz are planning on selling them door-to-door,
so you may want check first before opening your the door.
Comments