OK the whole discussion on whether or not wikipedia info is accurate or not made me want to see how fast 'mistakes' are corrected. Last night i decided i would post some extended truths on Wikipedia under Hamilton, New Zealand. I added that Hamilton also know as Hamihole is know throughout NZ to be abit of a dive and houses 80% percent of New Zealands 'emo' culture. Literally within 12 minutes this was deleted! I was sort of thinking it would last a few days until someone actually got offended and edited it. Just before i went on to the discussion pages of Hamilton and noticed that people are actually getting quite wound up and passionate about what information is put on the web page. I was wondering who are the people that are so specific about what gets added? Just everyday Hamilton citizens or is there a bigger force that is making sure Hamilton gets represented accurately and precisely the whole time? I am actually really curious about who is so passionately continually editing.
I personally really like the idea of wikipedia, it is not one sole authors opinion instead you get a bunch of different views from a range of people. As Thomas Chesney states, Wikipedia gets 60 million hits a day! that statistic has got to tell us something about how people rate wikipedia. Obviously Wikipedia hits problems with vandalism and people "publishing with an agenda" but generally i think it is a fairly good source.
I first discover wikipedia in 7th form when essay writing and i actually can remember using wikipedia as my only source because i thought it was more reliable then other web pages (not knowing it was a collaborative website that anyone could add info to). Last year i got a massive shock when i was told i WAS NOT to ever use Wikipedia as a resource, what else was i going to use??
Nowadays for Uni use i use Wikipedia as a starting point and then refine my search from there after i find out what the term generally means or is. For use other then Uni i automatically use Wikipedia when i want to quickly find out what something means or is. The info you get from Wikipedia seems to be written in a really easy to understand way and is easy to follow which suits me! The only mistakes that i have come across on Wikipedia are spelling ones, 13% of the articles contain mistake which i thought was quite high but that does include spelling which doesn't make it so bad!
Anyway i think you all get my drift on how i feel about wikipedia, feel free to comment!
Cya all 2mo :)
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3 comments:
heh, that hamilton thing is awesome!
I love your mad skills for (social) science! I have to admit, the speed of correction for your edits surprised me too.
And for the record, I (like most modernist academic types I know) have no problem with you starting with wikipedia. But you should move on from there, follow the trails, use your information literacy and develop your critical knowledge - aka: wiki shouldn't make the final reference list.
awesome post!
just thought i would share... i can't remember what i was browsing on wiki the other day, but i figured somebody had gone to town on so-called 'vandalising' that particular page. the stuff on there was just crazy, completely inaccurate and really really silly. so wish i could remember what i was looking at! i wonder if it got edited as fast as your hamilton experiment haha.
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