Wikipedia

Wikipedia Questions and Answers

a. What is Wikipedia?
Wikipedia is a Web-based encyclopedia project with over 8 million articles.

b. How would you answer the question posed in this piece “How reliable can a source be when anyone can edit it?”
I would like to believe that the only people who would edit a Wikipedia article are those who are trying to improve it. Hopefully no one would intentionally put wrong information online.

c. Who do the creators of Wikipedia place their trust in when it comes to weeding out misinformation? When it comes to weeding out misinformation, the creators of Wikipedia place their trust in the “wisdom of the crowds.”

d. Why did founder Larry Sanger leave Wikipedia? Larry Sanger left Wikipedia because he felt that it should give more credit to the experts who write articles for the site.

e. What would abuse or vandalism look like on a Wikipedia page? To a normal reader, abuse or vandalism may not stand out. It may just look like the factual information that is included on the site.

f. What do the statistics quoted in the third paragraph of this piece reveal? The statistics reveal that Wikipedia is a very widely used and very well-known website.

g. Why do you think Wikipedia is so successful? I think it’s so successful because there are so many articles. Also, Wikipedia articles are common results for Google searches.

h. Why might Wikipedia’s creators not want to accept advertising? Because there is still a possibility that the information is incorrect on a Wikipedia site, the creators may not want to accept advertising because they don’t want advertisers to be associated with any misinformation.

i. How does Wikiscanner help increase the reliability of Wikipedia entries? The Wikiscanner checks the IP address of anonymous users who want to edit the site.