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
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