Is Wikipedia always true?

Image By: Wikipedia.Inc (CC BY-SA 3.0)
This week as well as in the upcoming week, we are working with Wikipedia. We are looked at wiki post as well as editing a post that we felt needed some work. That being said, this made me think about just how much free reign people have to edit what they want on Wikipedia. A perfect example of this that was shown in class was from the Colbert Report. In this Steven Colbert goes onto Wikipedia and changes information about his own show as well encourages the viewers and audience to go onto Wikipedia and change the information about an elephant in Africa. This then lead to that page being frozen due to the influx of people that were trying to get onto Wikipedia in order to edit that page(.1). This makes me think about what exactly can you trust on Wikipedia, sure some things maybe facial and true. But, what stops people from putting completely false information up that people could believe is true?


Comments

  1. I agree with what you are saying. When I was in high school my teachers would always tell us not to use Wikipedia when we were writing our papers. Their fears were based on the fact that anyone could edit what goes on the pages. I would say that topics that are well talked about will be truthful because there will be a lot of eyes on them. So people would spot when something isn’t right and make changes. The only blind spot would be smaller talked about topics.

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  2. Wikipedia is an interesting concept due to the fact that it is editable to the public but it still is able to contain factual information that is resourceful to the public. Although not everything we read on Wikipedia is the truth, I have seen quite a bit of reliable information on their pages. It’s interesting to see how Wikipedia is able to fund itself primarily through the donations of others and still remain a successful site within our society.

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