Research Paper

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," he also said, “He was trying to make Wikipedia less vulnerable to tampering.” In USA Today they are saying,  “Wikipedia is a kind of collective brain, a repository of knowledge, maintained on servers in various countries and built by anyone in the world with a computer and an Internet connection who wants to share knowledge about a subject. 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 and found out some pretty interesting things concerning 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.” Students try and do research papers and get information off the website Wales say’s “he gets about 10 e-mail messages a week from students who complain that Wikipedia has gotten them into academic hot water.” 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.” Although Jimmy Wales Created Wikipedia he believes that it was a mistake to make it in the first place because it causing more harm than good.  The “Wikimedia Foundation” created in 2003 and is located in San Francisco operates Wikipedia.  If the people who operated Wikipedia can manage and control what goes on the website why is it the Wikipedia’s defenders say, “The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory, it can never work." If that’s true then why would they have created the website in first place?