Brittany Brinegar
Mr. Roberts
AP lit/comp
November 2, 2011
Is Wikipedia a reliable resource for us today? No, It’s not because when we use Wikipedia to do research on certain topics we can’t distinguish what’s true and what’s not. Jimmy Wales says “we have constant problems where we have people who are trying to repeatedly abuse our sites," Wales also said, “He was trying to make Wikipedia less vulnerable to tampering. Literally hundreds of thousands of people have written Wikipedia entries. Mistakes are going to be caught and corrected by later contributors and users.” So, I say no, because of the research I have done on Wikipedia. I have found out some pretty interesting things about Wikipedia and how it affects us in today’s society.
Jimmy Wales created Wikipedia in 2001 with Larry Sanger. "Wikipedia was the outgrowth of an online encyclopedia project, it was meant to hew to the traditional model — experts write the articles, and reviewers examine what they produce." "It was aided by being mentioned on the influential technology news site, Slashdot, Wikipedia quickly grew, and a new mousetrap was discovered." The new mousetrap today is that more and more people are getting sucked in to use Wikipedia because it’s the first thing that pops up after you hit the “enter” key. The reason people call it “The New Mousetrap” is because like a mousetrap it snaps when a mouse tries and grabs the piece of cheese. Wikipedia does by luring them in and then snapping it shut so they can’t get free. "In its first year, which was in 2001 Wikipedia has grown to more than 20,000 articles in 18 languages."
Wikipedia is not a reliable resource because the founder of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales says; “he wants to get the message out to college students that they shouldn’t use it for class projects or serious research.” It’s not that Wikipedia isn’t a reliable source for information it just as Wales quotes, “It’s good enough knowledge, depending on what your purpose is.” If that’s true then why would they have created the website in first place? Wales said,” The idea was that we could create a free encyclopedia for everybody.” I believe Mr. Wales had good intentions towards us by making the encyclopedia free, but it backfired on him and now his regretting what he has created. Newton’s third law states, “That for every action there is an opposite equal reaction.” I think Mr. Wales intended to help us with all his heart he knew he had a mission and was going to succeed in it no matter the outcome what I don’t think he realized was that even though he created this world wide phenomenon that people use in their everyday lives he really didn’t think about the consequences of his actions and how they would affect us. Jimmy Wales wasn’t looking to become rich he just thought that he would create a website were people could look up true, reliable information. We can’t punish him for this one mistake after all everybody makes mistakes in their lives whether or not we like it it’s not for us to judge him based on this one mistake he made in his life, but all we can do though is hope that he has learned from his mistake and not do it again that’s really all we can ask of him. So I say Wikipedia is not always reliable there are other sources of information not just Wikipedia.
Works Cited
Works Cited
Burrell, Clay. Wikipedia: "Wikipedia is not a Reliable Source". 3 January 2010. November 9 2011 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_source_examples#History>.
Contributors, Wikipedia. http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/wikipedia-founder-discourages-academic-use-of-his-creation/2305
15 August 2011. 9 November 2011 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_source_examples#History>.
Elaine. Is Wikipedia a Reliable Resource? 25 March 2007. 9 November 2011 <http://mgmt339.wordpress.com/2007/03/25/158/>.
Jaschick, Scott. http://mixergy.com/wikipedias-founder-jimmy-wales/
. 26 January 2007. 9 November 2011 <http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/01/26/wiki>.
Literature, AP. GWE. September 2011. 9 November 2011 <https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?hl=en_US&key=0Avh_W2An_wVRdFdMSnFpbW5lSkR4ejVsQWRobnFfdWc&hl=en_US&gid=0>.