Thursday, October 4, 2007

Education Blog 3

http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/2007/09/08/a-conversation-about-wikipedia/

"A Conversation About Wikipeida" is an article about how Wikipedia may not be as a reliable as everyone thinks. In a way it complains about how its source's are not always correct because anyone can run through one and change whatever they want. I'm not a big complainer but I do agree with what Mr. Warlick has to say this time. At the end of his blog, he asked the reader what the thought about this which I enjoyed very much because it caused me to critically think about this. I don't think anyone should be aloud to post whatever they want on such a widely used website. This can lead everyone in the world to have or present false information causing their thinking to change drastically about a topic. I continued to think about this and realized this could cause unnecessary arguments all over the place. Also, if people found out their sources were wrong, it could make them to beleive no other websites have correct information either.
Over the years I've known about Wikipedia, it has never crossed my mind to use this source just because I know how unreliable it can be. I've never understood why editing is allowed in the first place either. I found a statisctic that striked me. 61% of edits were registered by Wikipedia editors which left 39% for everyone else. Are there some things I don't know about it that will inform me about the editing process? Is there some sort of security check? Having these questions locked in my mind, I decided to do some research. After completing my searches I found that editors check what people have posted to make sure if it's reliable ot if it's just a comment. Then whats the point of even allowing editing by random people if it will get changed back if the information is not correct? I asked myself.
After learning my new facts, my thoughts about Wikipedia changed quite a bit. I understand now that it can be a very helpful source that is reilable. This relates to me for school projects and presentations knowing I do have a safe source. Now I don't have to worry about false information. However, if just in case I wanted to double check, I could scroll to the bottom of the page and check out the resources to see if they're credible or not. Now I do believe Wikipedia is a fairly good source to finding the correct facts.

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