For my next blog post,
I would like to talk about our recent class activity about editing Wikipedia. Thursday
in class, we had to edit Wikipedia and find an article that was relevant to our
project. This is interesting because you’re almost having to fact check a lot
of stuff in order to make sure that the information is reliable. For another class that I had to take, I have
an assignment that said that I had to edit it and I remember editing Maroon Five’s
Wikipedia page. What I find interesting
was that in class, you mentioned that Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia
both have the same amount of errors. Wikipedia is meant to be a free
encyclopedia. While Encyclopedia
Britannica is supposedly edited by elite for people with higher knowledge. That being said anyone can edit Wikipedia, such
as Stephen Colbert, who decided to edit the “African Elephant” page and said
their population tripled.
I think it is really interesting that you mentioned the fact that Wikipedia can be edited by anyone and still has about the same number of errors as the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Fact checking, as you mentioned, is a huge part of editing a page on Wikipedia. Even though I do not think people should only rely on Wikipedia for information, many still do, so for those people, it is up to the editors to make sure the page is accurate. I am glad Stephen Colbert showed the why editing is necessary through his elephant page editing stunt.
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