After reading the short article on Wikipedia, I've answered the following questions.
A.) What is Wikipedia?
Answer: "Wikipedia is a multilingual, Web-based encyclopedia project, operated by the
Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit organization."
B.) How would you answer the question posed in this piece “How reliable can a source be when anyone can edit it?”?
Answer: The source cannot be reliable if anyone can edit the posting. Although there probably are people who catch mistakes, not all postings can be monitored and filtered for absolute correct content.
C.) Who do the creators of Wikipedia place their trust in when it comes to weeding out misinformation?
Answer: The Wikiscanner and 10-20 paid employees.
D.) Why did founder Larry Sanger leave Wikipedia?
Answer: Mr. Sanger left Wikipedia, believing that it should give more authority to
experts; he has since created another site, Citizendium that does just that.
E.) What would abuse or vandalism look like on a Wikipedia page?
Answer: Self-interested editing by prominent businesses and governments.
F.) What do the statistics quoted in the third paragraph of this piece reveal?
Answer: People are using the internet to do research on a broad range of topics from all over the world. Wikipedia is the new encyclopedia.
G.) Why do you think Wikipedia is so successful?
Answer: I believe Wikipedia is so successful because the information they provide is easily obtainable through the website and for the most part, when writing research papers for school or doing research for a job, the information found on Wikipedia is considered credible.
H.) Why might Wikipedia’s creators not want to accept advertising?
Answer: I don't think Wikipedia wants its information to be influenced by the funds they would receive through advertising.
I.) How does Wikiscanner help increase the reliability of Wikipedia entries?
Answer: A tool allowing the IP address of anonymous editors of the site to be easily
checked. The Wikiscanner exposed people, businesses and governments who were using Wikipedia to promote themselves in the best light, not truly the facts.
I would not use Wikipedia for a research paper or for any reliable information. Although, most of the information is probably accurate, there is always a chance that it isn't and I wouldn't want to incorporate any wrong information into a teaching or assignment. The value of Wikipedia for teachers could be using the references that editors publish at the the end of an article. A teacher could find a book or article that is relevant to their teachings without having to directly use Wikipedia.
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