Can Wikipedia Ever Make the Grade?
By: Brock Read
Wikipedia has become a very popular site on the Internet. Mr. Halavais has even contributed to the site of Wikipedia himself, and spends time on the website browsing through articles. Because Wikipedia is a site where anyone may edit it, Mr. Halavais edited the site and added 13 errors. This is also why the website is criticized. He was very skeptical about the website himself, but 3 hours later his errors were fixed. He was even asked not to post nonsense on the site. Impressive! Since that incident, several scholars agreed that Wikipedia does a good job at making sure information on the site is factual. Some teachers are asking scholars to add articles to the site, to increase the amount of factual information available. Wikipedia was graded on the quality by the journal Nature. They were surprised to find that Wikipedia was in the same league as Britannica, averaging 4 mistakes. This is showing signs of success and improvement. I think that Wikipedia is a very good website to go to for information, and you can learn a lot on it. It’s neat how anyone can publish an article, or edit a posting. This gives the scholars the chance to pass down their knowledge, without going through the expenses and trouble of writing a whole book. I do think that Wikipedia has its place when it comes to research, and quoting for scholarly or even college papers. Even though Mr. Halavais’ mistakes were fixed right away, there is no guarantee that all mistakes will be fixed. My answer to “will Wikipedia ever make the grade”, is yes as long as the information is not used for research or scholarly papers.
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