Wikipedia....Reliable yes or no??

I will admit that I am a guilty user of Wikipedia. Almost every professor I have had made it clear to our class that we are not to use Wiki as a source for any paper done. This was almost impossible for me to do. It is so easy for me to just go to Wiki when I am unsure about a word or needed to know a definition. Wiki seemed to include anything I ever needed to know.

I never really saw the real harm in using Wiki so when given this assignment in my EDM 310 class to find out about the reliability of it, I decided to learn a little more about this encyclopedia Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia. The name is a portmanteau of the Hawaiian word for quick, “wiki“, and “encyclopedia”. The encyclopedia is updated in over 100 languages, including constructed languages such as Esperanto. The English version of Wikipedia contains over one and a half million articles. Wikipedia was founded as an extension of the expert-written Nupedia project. However, the idea of a publicly-written collaborative encyclopedia was rejected by Nupedia's advisory board, and the project was managed independently by several top Nupedia contributors. Despite this, Wikipedia soon eclipsed Nupedia in terms of content and traffic. Within two years the Nupedia project was abandoned, and all its content was incorporated into Wikipedia. Much of today's Wikipedia staff are former Nupedia staff. The fact that anybody with an internet connection can edit its contents, has made Wikipedia become viewed as an unreliable source of information. The encyclopedia allows anybody to edit its pages, even anonymously. To address this issue, and to ensure quality, accurate content, all submissions and edits are moderated and regulated by a staff of regular volunteer.

We were asked to review some blogs about wikipedia that can be found on the npr website. All of these blogs contained information concerning the reliability of Wikipedia. A grad student named Virgil Griffith wanted to create a web tool that made it possible for those who had been editing Wiki could be identified. The way this is made possible is that anytime a computer is used to edit or add to the encyclopedia a number is virtually scanned from the computer. Many big businesses have been accused of doctoring these edits to better themselves. An example of this is; someone at Dow chemical purged a whole section about agent orange and its harmfulness and made the whole thing disappear. Another example is that someone from Diebold deleted 15 paragraphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold. This article was critical of the company’s machines. This to me proves Griffiths idea about the scanner a very good idea.

During some of my Wiki research I came across a fact that in 2005 the scientific publication Nature performed a comparison of the accuracy of Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica, the leading print encyclopedia. It found that while the amount of errors per article in Wikipedia and Britannica were the same, the severity of errors in Wikipedia were worse. Encyclopedia Britannica suffered mostly from fact omission, whereas Wikipedia suffered from inaccurate information. This research made me have a whole new realization on Wiki. In the future I may not use this source as much and if I do I will be sure to double back and check it with something more reliable.