Comments on: Wikipedia: The Virtual City

By: dallas michaels

dallas michaels — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 03:57:31 +0000

In my daughter’s elementary school, they can’t even use Wikipedia as a reference for their reports. There’s too much variance going on there for the comfort of the teachers. I believe in crowd-sourcing for reaching consensus to a degree, but the editors at Wikipedia can easily override a smart edit. Overall, it is not much more than a general reference resource that needs severe fact-checking IMO.

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By: V. Espinosa

V. Espinosa — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 00:29:19 +0000

I really like Wikipedia. I agree that it is a useful source for initial research; it helps answer questions and provides a reasonable approximation to satisfy one’s curiosity. I also love that it is always being edited and open for improvement, as I think everything should be. I find Wikipedia socially intriguing, and frankly, I’m quite amazed of its existence. Economics usually operates under several assumptions, one of them being that economic agents are selfish, which is arguably quite reasonable. So why is it that people spend so much time doing something for free and for the benefit of everyone else? Is it that online media is allowing us to return to the so called gift economy? People want to participate and the internet has made this possible. It has allowed the little people to contribute and compete face to face against the big ones, just as with Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica. There have been made a few studies comparing these two, and it turns out that they both contain about the same number of “serious” mistakes! I guess we can’t expect any encyclopaedia to be perfect, but the fact that Wikipedia is of comparable quality considering how it’s made, is simply astonishing.

By: Michael Wells

Michael Wells — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 03:25:28 +0000

The book “The Professor and the Madman” tells the story of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, in its time the greatest reference in the English language. It was generated by hundreds of contributors sending definitions through the mail to be sorted into cubbyholes.

When Henry Louis Gates set out to create the Encyclopedia of Africa and African-Americans he did much the same with newer technology.

The accumulation of knowledge from multiple sources isn’t new, the community editing is, and it works. A 2005 study reported in Nature compared Wikipedia and Britannica for accuracy and found them roughly equivalent. The difference is Wikipedia gets better daily, encyclopedias annually or less.

By: Monte Asbury

Monte Asbury — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 16:57:16 +0000

“If you want fact (or a closer representation of fact), check out Britannica…”

That Britannica – or any of its type – are “right” is doubtless less true than we imagine. Our reverence for academia and our conviction that everything can be reduced to a “correct” logical presentation have probably fooled us into overstating the accuracy of such tools and placing Wikipedia further from them than it really need be. Britannica information should be regarded as less than gospel, too.

Thanks for allowing some wiggle room in your comment.

By: John Oldman

John Oldman — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 17:44:33 +0000

If you Wikipedia (adjective) the word Wikipedia (noun) you are told that “it is currently the most popular general reference work on the Internet”. Of course, like all things “Wiki”, we cannot be certain if this is fact. After all, Wikipedia is more democratic than absolutist; it favours “consensus over credentials in its editorial process”. The lack of fact does not diminish from the greatness of Wikipedia. If you want fact (or a closer representation of fact), check out Britannica or Encarta. Wikipedia is something different and yet even more valuable. Wikipedia has billions of editors comprising of a Virtual City. As each day passes, Wikipedia approaches absolute fact (although it will never actually arrive there) and the fact-building is happening at an exponentially rapid rate.

As Tappscott points out, Wikipedia has striking similarities to a city. As long as those who govern it are responsible, the things it can achieve are boundless.

In the meantime, like all things in life, you have to challenge the “truth” behind queries. But what is “truth”? According to Wikipedia, “The term has no single definition about which a majority of professional philosophers and scholars agree, and various theories of truth continue to be debated.”