The Reliability of Wikipedia
By Calice Robins and Kayla McWard
Wikipedia is a crowdsourced online encyclopedia that is free and open to the public. Wikipedia allows users to add and edit content. For the past 13 years Wikipedia has brought information to millions of knowledge seekers. The website was officially launched on January 15, 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger (Sidener, 2004). Now in 2014, Wikipedia has over 30 million articles in 286 languages and has 129,828 active editors (Wikipedia, 2014).
Wikipedia is constantly being updated by their 21 million editors. With such a large volume of information pouring in, inaccuracies do occur. This possibility for wrong information included in the articles has given Wikipedia an infamous reputation of being unreliable. However, the pros of Wikipedia outweigh the cons. While traditional encyclopedias are constantly going out of date, Wikipedia is being continually updated as new information becomes available. Studies suggest that Wikipedia is almost or as reliable as traditional encyclopedias.
Wikipedia has a range of articles that have a variety of topics. The articles are divided into categories that include arts, history, society, biography, mathematics, technology, geography, science, and an all portals category that includes all the general information. On this online encyclopedia, you can read about the Millennium Prize Problems, get a list of the Presidents of the United States, and learn about a tree frog, all in one day. Wikipedia allows its users to find information on almost any and every topic they can think of. Wikipedia users have all this knowledge at the tips of their fingers.
Wikipedia can be openly edited by anyone that is a Wikipedia member. A Wikipedia member can be anyone. According to the 2011 Wikipedia Editor Survey, statistics show that 91% of Wikipedia editors are male, 20% reside in the United States, 76% of the editors primarily edit in English, 59% of the editors range in age from 17 to 40, 71% of editors contribute because they like the idea of sharing knowledge, and 69% believe that information should be freely available. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedians http://toolserver.org/~emijrp/wikimediacounter/
The Encyclopedia Britannica is a printed encyclopedia. The encyclopedia’s first edition was printed in 1768. It is written by about 100 full-time editors and more than 4,000 contributors, including 110 Nobel Prize winners and five American presidents. The encyclopedia has recently stopped the production and distribution of it’s paper copy due to the .... The encyclopedia will continue online, but will come with a price, unlike Wikipedia which is completely free.
Wikipedia editors update articles every second. It’s been updated over 2.3 billion times as of April 27, 2014. With such a large volume of information, inaccuracies are not uncommon. According to Jim Giles, co-founder of MATTER (a science and technology magazine), there are on average four inaccuracies per Wikipedia article. However, inaccuracies are not unique to Wikipedia. Encyclopedia Britannica has an average of three inaccuracies per article (Giles, 2006). When compared to traditional textbooks, the University of Melbourne found that Wikipedia’s information was generally as good as or better than information found in textbooks concerning mental health (University of Melbourne, 2012).
Wikipedia is a crowdsourced online encyclopedia that is free and open to the public. Wikipedia allows users to add and edit content. For the past 13 years Wikipedia has brought information to millions of knowledge seekers. The website was officially launched on January 15, 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger (Sidener, 2004). Now in 2014, Wikipedia has over 30 million articles in 286 languages and has 129,828 active editors (Wikipedia, 2014).
Wikipedia is constantly being updated by their 21 million editors. With such a large volume of information pouring in, inaccuracies do occur. This possibility for wrong information included in the articles has given Wikipedia an infamous reputation of being unreliable. However, the pros of Wikipedia outweigh the cons. While traditional encyclopedias are constantly going out of date, Wikipedia is being continually updated as new information becomes available. Studies suggest that Wikipedia is almost or as reliable as traditional encyclopedias.
Wikipedia has a range of articles that have a variety of topics. The articles are divided into categories that include arts, history, society, biography, mathematics, technology, geography, science, and an all portals category that includes all the general information. On this online encyclopedia, you can read about the Millennium Prize Problems, get a list of the Presidents of the United States, and learn about a tree frog, all in one day. Wikipedia allows its users to find information on almost any and every topic they can think of. Wikipedia users have all this knowledge at the tips of their fingers.
Wikipedia can be openly edited by anyone that is a Wikipedia member. A Wikipedia member can be anyone. According to the 2011 Wikipedia Editor Survey, statistics show that 91% of Wikipedia editors are male, 20% reside in the United States, 76% of the editors primarily edit in English, 59% of the editors range in age from 17 to 40, 71% of editors contribute because they like the idea of sharing knowledge, and 69% believe that information should be freely available. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedians http://toolserver.org/~emijrp/wikimediacounter/
The Encyclopedia Britannica is a printed encyclopedia. The encyclopedia’s first edition was printed in 1768. It is written by about 100 full-time editors and more than 4,000 contributors, including 110 Nobel Prize winners and five American presidents. The encyclopedia has recently stopped the production and distribution of it’s paper copy due to the .... The encyclopedia will continue online, but will come with a price, unlike Wikipedia which is completely free.
Wikipedia editors update articles every second. It’s been updated over 2.3 billion times as of April 27, 2014. With such a large volume of information, inaccuracies are not uncommon. According to Jim Giles, co-founder of MATTER (a science and technology magazine), there are on average four inaccuracies per Wikipedia article. However, inaccuracies are not unique to Wikipedia. Encyclopedia Britannica has an average of three inaccuracies per article (Giles, 2006). When compared to traditional textbooks, the University of Melbourne found that Wikipedia’s information was generally as good as or better than information found in textbooks concerning mental health (University of Melbourne, 2012).
