The World and Wikipedia: How We Are Editing Reality by Dalby explains the inner works of Wikipedia. The book starts off with examples of how easy it is for users to edit and change information on certain subjects. Warko sparked an article about an earthquake in Italy with his 2 lines of contribution. Within the next half hour he has revised the article several times and by the end of the day, the article has been retitled, 1000 words in length, and in both English and Spanish versions by other contributors. There are many advantages and disadvantages of using Wikipedia as a type of resource. The advantages are that it is a way for people to share information and to connect just like how people were aware of the earthquake around the globe in a matter of seconds.
The disadvantages are that people could easily deface and vandalize the website. Contributors like Keykingz13 created an account on Wikipedia for the sole purpose of vandalizing the site by re-editing various articles through grammatically incorrect English. It took careful notice from editors like Andrew Dalby to realize that there has been false alterations and information that have been spread onto the articles.
A lot of teachers have been telling their students that Wikipedia is not a credible source. I like to think otherwise. I use Wikipedia for a lot of things and I feel that it is definitely a legit source. To me, technology is an incredible source. The amount of data and information that can be found on Web 2.0 is amazing and overwhelming at times. To a lot of us, the Internet is the number one form of resource. I love to google everything so whenever I do, Wikipedia is always on the top 5 things listed. Technology like Wikipedia is neither naturally good or bad. It is really up to the user in how they attain and utilize technology.
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