a. What is Wikipedia? "a multilingual, Web-based encyclopedia project, operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit organization". A collection of informative entries edited by the users of the site.
b. How would you answer the question posed in this piece “How reliable can a source be when anyone can edit it?”? Not very reliable. Very difficult to verify information and sources when entries can be continually edited and updated.
c. Who do the creators of Wikipedia place their trust in when it comes to weeding out misinformation? "wisdom of crowd" They believe that because a lot of people have acess to edit, errors will be corrected quickly.
d. Why did founder Larry Sanger leave Wikipedia? He felt more authority to edit should be given to experts.
e. What would abuse or vandalism look like on a Wikipedia page? Incorrect or biased information postings
f. What do the statistics quoted in the third paragraph of this piece reveal? That use of Wikipedia is world wide and that Google is a contributor to its sucess.
g. Why do you think Wikipedia is so successful? People love the idea of putting their knowledge "out there" and influencing other people's opinions
h. Why might Wikipedia’s creators not want to accept advertising? Accepting money for donations and allowing advertisments would lessen the reliability of information due to bias.
i. How does Wikiscanner help increase the reliability of Wikipedia entries? Allows wikipedia to discover the source of information quickly revealing any fraudulent postings.
Citation: Information Published on the Times Topic Page on Wikipedia on October 18, 2007.
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