Page 340 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2
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wikiPedia
A wiki is a type of Web log (blog) that is collectively worked on by multiple authors. Cre-
ated in 2001, Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia written and edited by thousands of vol-
unteers spanning the globe. According to the Web site, as of March 2007, there were over
75,000 active contributors (though only about 1,000 or so regular ones) working on more than
5,300,000 articles in more than 100 languages (though English far eclipses any of the other
languages represented with approximately 1,670,000 articles). Daily, an average of 4,000
new articles are added to the site, though nearly half of those are deleted that same day for
lack of value, accuracy, or proper sourcing. There were over 38 million visitors to the site in
December 2006 alone, making it the 13th most popular destination on the Internet and the
third most popular news and information source, beating out CNN.com and Yahoo News.
Reading and Writing Wikipedia
Wikipedia’s popularity has translated into the Web site’s regular use by high school
and college students researching term papers and even by the American judicial system.
Over 100 judicial rulings—13 coming from the circuit court of appeals, one step below the
Supreme Court—have relied on Wikipedia in reaching their verdicts. Such widespread use
has also produced a backlash over concerns about the site’s accuracy and verification stan-
dards. The site has been vandalized by intentional misinformation. An entry on John Seigen-
thaler, Sr. linked him to conspiracies about John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Seigenthaler was
the one to identify the hoax. The site faced further controversy when Wikipedia’s founder,
Jimmy Wales, violated the encyclopedia’s ban on self-editing. Wales thrice removed infor-
mation from his own entry concerning former partner Larry Sanger that played up the latter’s
role in founding Wikipedia.
In order to counter such problems, Wikipedia has recently adopted a more definitive
editorial hierarchy, in which volunteer administrators have been given the authority to edit,
remove, and prevent changes to particular articles. While the vast majority of articles re-
main open for anyone to edit, certain hotly contested or regularly hoaxed pieces are now
protected or semiprotected (you must be a registered Wikipedia member for at least four
days to edit a semiprotected piece) against changes. Amongst these entries are those on
Albert Einstein, George W. Bush, Adolf Hitler, and Christina Aguilera. While implemented
to ensure better quality control, protection practices reassert a hierarchy of expertise that
Wikipedia’s open-access structures supposedly challenge. Perhaps not surprisingly, many
college professors refuse to let their students quote Wikipedia as a source. Others, however,
see Wikipedia as an opportunity to get students involved in community-based knowledge-
building initiatives.
example, the majority of Wikipedia’s 1,025 entries in Swahili have been written
by whites living in the United States because of a lack of access to computers
in Africa. This raises important questions about who has the right to speak for
whom and whether or not traditional power hierarchies structured along racial