How Important Is Wikipedia In The Grand Scheme Of Things?

Wikipedia is the center of the online encyclopedia universe. Millions of entries on every conceivable topic makes this website an authority source that many young students and adults turn to from all corners of the globe.

The widespread popularity of Wikipedia has made it an easy target for quite a bit of controversy and critique. Many academic institutions disapprove of any use of unverified Internet sources, including Wikipedia articles. Ironically, Wikipedia prides itself on the idea that its information is verifiable. Read more about Wikipedia s Verifiability policy here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability

Wikipedia Basics

Founded in 2001, Wikipedia is a free content resource that anyone can submit information to according to certain submission rules. Articles are written and submitted by anyone interested in the topic being discussed.

Authenticity is supposedly ensured by the ability of others to edit previously submitted information and correct any errors. Grossly inappropriate or incorrect articles can be nominated for deletion. Wikipedia users are given a week to vote on the appropriate response to a deletion nomination.

These safeguards have been built into Wikipedia s design as a way of preserving both its credibility and authenticity. While Wikipedia s systems of checks and balances are not failsafe, they do eliminate quite a few of the errors that would otherwise occur.

The fact that the website s content is made up exclusively by donated content and that it has over 2 million topic articles is a testament to the popularity of this style. While there are no basic rules for submitting articles, there are basic guidelines that Wikipedia asks submitting authors to follow.

Maintaining a neutral tone and presenting the information in a fair unbiased way are the perfect tones that dictate encyclopedia articles. Authors and editors are expected to be respectful of the work of others and not to modify anything without a good reason or verifiable references.

Controversy

Academic institutions and authority reference sources such as encyclopedia companies have been less impressed with Wikipedia than the general public. There are many reasons for the less than enthusiastic response from institutions of higher learning and professional reference companies.

The publishers of Encyclopedia Britannica became enraged when a study claimed that the accuracy of Wikipedia was comparable to the accuracy of Britannica s long-standing published encyclopedia. They widely disputed the results, insisting that their publication is by far the more superior publication.

Public opinion sides with Britannica. The majority of most people, when polled, have great faith in the reputation of Britannica and hold it in much higher regard than its online counterparts.

The convenience of the Internet encyclopedia version is where a lot of its competition with Britannica arises. Being able to access any information with the click of a mouse brings research to a whole new level.

Wikipedia and Academics

Studies are regularly inconsistent on the accuracy of Wikipedia. There is a wide range in the quality and accuracy of the Wiki articles online.

Articles are constantly being modified and improved upon. When doing research, it is very important to double-check all information. Wikipedia is a great resource, but it should never be trusted as the final word on any topic.

Members of academia are prone to carry negative feelings towards to the use of Wikipedia. Most become agitated when their students source Wikipedia, because they feel their students are not able to tell the difference between a good resource and a bad one a truthful fact or an erroneous statement.

A commonly held belief is that a student lacks the common sense or ability to differentiate between a good article and a biased, inadequate presentation of a story as fact. Academia also points to the general lack of solid research supporting most Wikipedia articles.

Lazy Research

There is no excuse for laziness, but the blame for it is often placed on the presence of technology instead of where it actually belongs on the people who rely on technology to provide them the shortcuts they take.

The modern age is one of advanced technology and many students are more than willing to take advantage of the ease of relying on computers and minimal online research.

The primary function of schools is to teach children. Not only are they responsible for teaching them facts, but also for teaching them how to think and solve problems for themselves. When students are no longer able, or willing, to logically decide something, academics are quick to blame the ease of access to technological advances, separating themselves from the blame.

Unfortunately, schools hold as much blame as the technology they bash, for the falling ability of students to produce results on their own. When I was in high school during the early 1980 s, calculators were prohibited in all classes except for the advanced mathematics classes that required the use of scientific calculators. By the mid-1990 s, the children of friends were telling me that they were required to bring a simple calculator to the classroom to assist them in their basic math calculations.

Academia is generally as responsible for the falling academic performance of students as website sources such as Wikipedia. Although academia shares in the blame for falling academic performance with poor resources like Wikipedia, this shared blame should not excuse Wikipedia s less than ideal service record.

One Thousand Monkeys Typing The Next Great Novel

Wikipedia and all of its sister projects are not perfect. They are websites dedicated to providing knowledge to everyone. Those willing to share what they have learned donate to this knowledge base in hopes of helping others. At least, that is what they do in theory.

The Wikipedia frontier has real possibility for the future, but behind the scenes, it is rife with "monkeys learning to type the next great novel," as sourced in the Infinite Monkey Theorem at (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite monkey theorem). There are some areas of the Wikipedia that are definitely lacking in information and credibility, and yet when someone makes a gesture to add to the Wiki knowledge base, some editors frame these new contributions as unsupportable and unacceptable additions to the Wikipedia world.

The Wikipedia world relies upon its published Code Of Conduct to drive the decisions of its editors. Examples of the Wikipedia Code Of Conduct include: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable sources http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:BIO

The Wikipedia Monkey Brigade

One extreme example of the "Wikipedia Monkey Brigade" is the story of how Danny Sullivan noticed the attempt by some editor to delete the Matt Cutts chapter in the encyclopedia.

For those involved in the study of search engines, Danny Sullivan is one of the most recognized experts in the field of search engines, and has been since 1997. As the founder of Search Engine Watch, and now the editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, Danny even has his own page in the Wikipedia world: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny Sullivan %28technologist%29

It seems some Wikipedia editor decided that Matt Cutts was not notable enough for his own chapter in the Wikipedia. For those of us who work in the search engine optimization community, such a suggestion is absolutely obscene. As a quality control engineer for Google and the voice of Google s spam detection department, people in the search industry pay close attention to what Cutts says about the future of search placement within Google.

Sullivan suggested that the attempt to delete the Matt Cutts page was at the very least an example of how "inept" the Wikipedia editors have shown themselves to be. You can read Sullivan s heartfelt argument here: http://searchengineland.com/070108-170335.php

Almost as interesting as Sullivan s blog post about the suggestion to delete the Matt Cutts page from the Wikipedia, was the page where people argued the decision about whether the page was worthy of deletion. You can read that interchange here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Matt Cutts

Those supporting the deletion of the page were quick to point out the Wikipedia guidelines on Notability at: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:BIO) Strangely, I had read the guidelines myself and I felt that Matt Cutts was a slam-dunk for inclusion.

The Good Faith Argument

Much to my own surprise, the fellow who originally suggested that the Matt Cutts page should have been deleted got into the fray that resulted from his action. He even made reference to having read Sullivan s comments and chose to use them as a springboard to belittle Sullivan:

"The sources provided by Sullivan in his blog are interesting and some would even make great additions to a number of AfD-submitted articles to help fulfill notability (it s a shame he spent the time to make personal commentary about me on his blog than to improve these poorly drafted articles, but to each his own)."

For a guy who quotes the Wikipedia guidelines about "assuming good faith" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:AGF) as frequently as he does, I think his own comments about Sullivan betray his double standards about "good faith".

It is true that one would not expect anyone who studied Bioinformatics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioinformatics) in college to understand who the players are in the search industry, but then one would also not expect a person who knew nothing about an industry to judge who is notable in that industry either. It would be like me assuming to be able to identify notable people in the bioinformatics field... Yep, that would be dishonest and silly.

Final Thoughts

The one thing that makes the world of Wikipedia both great and terrible is the same; it is the ability of people to make corrections to the Wikipedia encyclopedia when they see the need to do so. But, the truth is that any monkey with a keyboard and an Internet connection can create and edit documents in the Wikipedia community.

Even I am a Wikipedia editor... I may even be a monkey editor, but at the end of the day, I don t monkey around editing information about which I am clueless.



Bookmark it:

Two Dads: One Computer-Maniac, The Other Computer-Phobic

I have two Dads. That sounds strange doesn t it? One is my genetic father, and the other is my geneticist father. The genetic Dad I ve only ever lived with for one year when I was an infant, while the geneticist Dad is what you would call a step-father, but I ve lived in close proximity with him for more than 20 years. I feel close to them both. I connect differently with each of them but on a pretty much equal level. The reason I m sharing my personal information with you is because I ve just had a realisation about my fathers in relation to the area that I work in: computers and the Internet. It s really quite interesting.
One father is a computer maniac. Whenever a new technology, software, gadget, or website emerges he is one of the first to grab it up and evaluate it. My other father has an old piece-of-crap box that looks something like a computer, with a tediously slow dial-up connection to the World Wide Web. Compared to the wireless, broadband Mac personal computer and mobile-connected Mac laptop of the enthusiast, they couldn t be from further parts of the galaxy.
Then there s me. I could be construed as being a walking paradox, an enigma, or just plainly twisted when it comes to my relationship with the computer and Internet sphere of life. Nature/nurture, genetic/environmental For whatever strange reason, I have turned out to be a combination of the two papas. I work as a creative writer for an Internet web-hosting company. I love the ideas and valuable functions and tools that the Internet has brought to humanity (or was it humanity that brought it to the Internet?). However, I have issues and challenges when it comes to using these awe-inspiring machines.
Currently I am away from home in a different city visiting my girlfriend. At home (I am currently living with my parents-Mother and geneticist, as I m going to live overseas soon) all I have to do to get on the Internet is open up my laptop and I m on-line. If I m at work, I go to my PC and all of my settings are stored and ready for me to use. While in a new place, things haven t been running as smoothly as I would ve liked. The answers are probably simple and easy to do, but this is one of the kinds of challenges that cause me to stumble. Although I am deeply interested and have a true faith in this new technology, I am a real novice when it comes to getting things done on someone else s computer.
I brought my laptop with me. My girlfriend only has a dial-up connection which she uses with her laptop. I could use hers but she s Chinese so a lot of what comes up on the screen is illegible to me. I don t know how to change her language configuration. I m used to doing it quite easily on my Mac, but her computer is a PC and I m not as practiced in this other format. That s one of my problems. I only have so much patience when it comes to working these technological issues out; it could be a trait passed on by my ice-age father (No judgement is being laid here. He just doesn t feel that he can work new technologies out. He s had a digital telephone answering machine for two years which he still hasn t set up. He feels bad about it but his manual one does the job, so he sticks with it.). I m also a little afraid to hook my laptop up to her dial-up line as I know from experience that I ll have to change some settings of which I am not confident about doing.
So the next answer was to go to her university where she said people use their laptops wirelessly in the library. That sounded cool so I went in and tried it out. I even tried changing the settings to get it to work (It took courage.) but I couldn t get it to work. I was weary about asking for help because I wasn t really a student at that particular learning establishment. Instead, I ve been using the library s computers. This is OK, but since I can t walk away with the files I create (I borrowed my girlfriend s thumb-drive but an experience from the past of not being able to transfer information from PC to Mac deters me from using it-again, an irrational fear. I know it, and I will give it a try this week. I ve resorted to saving my files in my email account as attachments. It s not conventional, but it works.
Another issue I ve had is getting onto my messenger service. The university computers don t have it on their desktop, and when I tried to download an on-line version I was told that I didn t have the authority to do so. I went to an Internet caf , and I could do work there (I m working on the road) but I feel kind of silly paying to get paid. It was cool there though as they had messenger with voice and video and I was able to have a conversation with my brother who is travelling around India. He could see my sister and me, but we couldn t see him as he said the Indian computer devices (webcams, headsets) in that town were looking a little bit crappy in design and also looked worse for wear. It was heaps of fun making funny faces knowing that he would be seeing us. I think he s getting lonely as he s only 19 years old and has been away from home for over 7 months.
As you can see I ve inherited beliefs about computer from both of my Dads. I find things more difficult than most, I believe, but I m not going to give up doing my best to get the things done that I feel are necessary. Over time I hope to get over these little obstacles and hurdles and become proficient in all of the cool aspects of this new realm of human endeavour. I also have faith that the technicians and engineers are probably working hard to make things simple for the rest of us.
Whatever happens, I m going to stick with it, and when I go to see my genetic father next I m going to do my best to inspire him to buy a new computer with a Broadband connection. Then all I have to do is show him a few of the amazing things that this human created Internet tool can do. One of the aspects of the Web that affects me most profoundly is the simple fact that if you think of anything at all in the known Universe, you can then look it up on your search engine like Google and in the time it takes to blink your eye, immediately start to learn. It sure beats catching the train to the library, looking up a book in the card catalogue, searching for it, then finding out that someone else has borrowed it and is late bringing it back.



Bookmark it:

How To Compare Residential VOIP Offerings

Many people are turning to VOIP phone for several different reasons, the biggest reason being cost. The landline telephone has been in existence for one hundred years; however, many people are finding that VOIP offers a great deal more, for a great deal less. There is one requirement though, you must have a broadband connection, otherwise known as a highspeed Internet connection. While there are some minor differences between the traditional telephone and a VOIP phone, many people simply enjoy the money saving features.

What cost savings you say? With a VOIP phone (using your highspeed Internet connection to make and receive phone calls), you can make unlimited local and usually also unlimited long distance calls in the continental US for one price, where that one price is frequently less than the cost of just getting a DIAL TONE from your local phone company. Is it starting to make more sense now?

With VOIP, you receive comparable reliability and quality of traditional telephone service without all the added fees we tend to experience from our phone company. Have you ever opened your bill and noticed the big jump in cost? Here is a personal example, this writer has experienced with a local telephone company. I simply have a phone, yes some of the perks as well, such as call waiting, call waiting plus, caller ID, and caller ID plus. When I ordered the service, of course it was all conveniently placed in a package that was to cost me $35 a month. Imagine my surprise when I open my phone bill and it was $89 for the month, that is just the phone, does not include the cost of internet, which put the bill over $100.

Now you are probably thinking well long distance calls will do that. Yes, it would, except I purposely do not have long distance on my telephone, so that was not the case in this scenario. I had a ton of hidden charges for this, that, and everything else. Now with a VOIP phone, it hooks up directly to your internet connection, and most VOIP providers offer several different packages that are designed to fit both your needs and your budget. For example, one company offers unlimited long distance calling, local calling, plus all the perks such as E-911 service, voicemail, caller ID, call waiting, Call forwarding, 3-way calling, and such others, for only $24.99. That is your bill, one flat rate each month. Tell me, which you would rather pay, $89 a month or $24.99 for just about the same service. The choice is clear.

When considering a VOIP phone it is important that you do some comparison shopping. The internet is full of fabulous deals from VOIP providers and it is important that you take a look at the various companies and find the one that fits your needs, as well as your budget. Another thing about VOIP is that you can choose from several different packages with each provider. Some may include a VOIP phone line with long distance, without long distance, or for multiple phone lines, perfect for kid s phone or a home office.

There are some disadvantages to VOIP service. For example, your fax machine may not work reliably over the VOIP. Furthermore, if you have satellite internet within your home, you may find that the VOIP fails to work in a reliable manner as well. It is very important that you do your homework, finding out exactly what options you have, and what works best for your specific needs.



Bookmark it: