What Are The Pros And Cons Of Wikipedia

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When it comes to Wikipedia, most of us will agree that Wikipedia has one of the most largest and popular general reference work on the Internet. Where this agreement ends, however, is on the spectrum of obtaining believable articles and sources through Wikipedia. Where some people are convinced that it is completely ok to do the majority of their research through Wikipedia. Where other people support it because they can edit anything on the website and create new articles which comes from an unreliable source. Today i’m going to argue the benefits of Wikipedia and provide for the modern day person. Wikipedia was founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001, the successor of the website Nupedia which was founded on the principle of a heavily …show more content…

While Wikipedia does face a crazy amount of denunciation, I believe there has been a similar if not more amount of praise and approval directed at the website. While many dispute credibility, Wikipedia contributors have self organized to devise a set of best practices to improve the perceived credibility of the articles. From a contributor's perspective improving credibility is a three step process. “(1) a contributor challenges some part of the article’s content; (2) The same contributor triggers a discussion over the challenge, which yields researching tasks to find appropriate references; And (3) those references are added to the article’s content (Lopes, Rui, Carrico, 2008)”. Sources are heavily scrutinized by other contributors, and as a result wiki maintains a large group that “police” all articles on the website. Wikipedia’s main goal is assisting individuals with a general perception of any topic. The majority of Wikipedia's critics cite sourcing as its number one problem. Wikipedia is a starting point, it was never intended to be an ending point. Wikipedia is great for getting a general understanding of a topic before diving into the research

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