Wiki-what?

Web Friday. Today is Wikipedia Day. Why? Because somehow there are people who have not yet realized that Wikipedia is there to help you.

Now, I'm going to start with a disclaimer... Wikipedia is NOT always accurate. And sometimes they are VERY wrong. But, they have really great "lists" of things/people/events, and they can be a good place to go for a quick and easy answer to a simple question.

I wanted to link to an example of a very bad Wikipedia article here, but it'll shortly fix itself. Why? Because the entries are user-created and edited. I personally went and fixed part of the entry for Mrs. Warren's Profession, a play that I did a dramaturgy casebook on my first semester of graduate school. However, on every page you can check out the history of revisions made to that page.

Wikipedia has been around since 2001, and I think I discovered it sometime around 2005. Last August, we surpassed 2.5 million articles in English. There's over 200 languages that you can find articles in, and only about 25% of all articles are in English.

Wikipedia has spurred the creation of many other "wikis." Now, the word "wiki" is Hawaiian for "fast," but it has come to mean "user-edited" and even many online classrooms use a wiki of sorts.

China, Iran, Tunisia, Syria, the UK, and Uzbekistan have all blocked Wikipedia for their countries at one point or another, and Qatar was blocked from using it by Wikipedia admins for a short period of time. China blocked Wikipedia on the anniversary of Tiananmen Square, for one.

And no, just because it's user-run doesn't mean that you can have an article about yourself. All articles need to be worthy of publication... as in, there needs to be secondary material supporting it, in magazines, academic journals, or other media.

Now, a word about reliability and accessibility. Because it's pretty easy to use (although the "sounds like" has been plagues with issues forever), a lot of people use ONLY Wikipedia, rather than relying on it as a starting point from which to build additional research. During the three semesters I spent as a TA, I caught several plagiarizers who used Wikipedia exclusively to write a paper. I'm not going to lecture on plagiarism, but just remember that Wikipedia should NEVER constitute your only source of information. Reliability... while there have been many arguments that users ruin articles by writing about random crap on article pages, the amount of "serious errors" rivals that of any other encyclopedia. That said, I've also talked with students who got entire summaries of plays from the site, and they no don't understand the play.

(flashback to "Frankenstein goes to the Mountains" for my readers who went to high school with me)

If you have not yet gotten addicted to reading about one thing after another (the inter-linkings on the site are crazy-fascinating), go try it. NOW.