DJE # 8

a. What is Wikipedia? 
b. How would you answer the question posed in this piece “How reliable can a source be when anyone can edit it?”? 
c. Who do the creators of Wikipedia place their trust in when it comes to weeding out misinformation? 
d. Why did founder Larry Sanger leave Wikipedia? 
e. What would abuse or vandalism look like on a Wikipedia page? 
f. What do the statistics quoted in the third paragraph of this piece reveal? 
g. Why do you think Wikipedia is so successful? 
h. Why might Wikipedia’s creators not want to accept advertising? 
i. How does Wikiscanner help increase the reliability of Wikipedia entries?

 

a. Wikipedia is a multilingual, Web-based encyclopedia project, operated by a non profit organization, Wikimedia foundation.

b.When anyone can edit questions asked on wikipedia they are not reliable at all. The person answering them could be intelligent and be correct or they could be completely wrong and just answering for the heck of it.

c.Wikipedia puts their faith in the "wisdom of crowds".

d.Larry Sanger left Wikipedia because he believed that it should give more authority to experts.

e.Abuse and vandalism would be considered errors and bad editing.

f.The statistics reveal that there are wikipedias in more than 280 languages with a total of more than 8 million articles. Also the encyclopedia is among the top 10 most visited sites on the Internet around the world, due to the fact that Google searches typically list Wikipedia on result pages.

g.I think that Wikipedia is so successful because of Google.In my answer above it states Google lists Wikipedia on result pages. Everyone who knows what Google is uses it, therefore it is a huge success.

h.Wikipedia relies on donations from visitors and other, indirect commercial efforts.

i.Wikiscanner exposes examples of self-interested editing by prominent businesses and governments around the world.