Second Draft (:

Wikipedia War

By: Ana Jimenez

            There has been a lot of controversy over the accuracy of Wikipedia for a long period of time. Some people think that this site isn’t really reliable because of the option users have to be able to edit anything on any article. Others think that Wikipedia is just as useful as Google. There are a lot of different ideas being spread around about Wikipedia. There are many reasons why Wikipedia is just as reliable as Google or any other search engine, but here is the top three.

            One reason is because if its continuity.   Our class of students all went to different articles on Wikipedia to change little things on each article. Our goal was to figure out how long it would take the company to fix the errors we made. All of us waited and recorded our data on how long it took them to fix our mistakes. The data, we collected, showed us that as soon as we made the changes, most of them were corrected in a short amount of time. Some student’s errors were corrected in a two-day period. Nonetheless, most of the mistakes were fixed. This makes me assume that Wikipedia is well monitored or they regularly check for changes made to articles that are incorrect. To me, Wikipedia seems to know when something is being changed and they are there to fix any errors.

            Another reason why Wikipedia is a credible source is because a man by the name of Thomas Chesney also conducted an experiment to see if Wikipedia was just as accurate as everyone thought.  Nate Anderson wrote an article about the experiment he conducted because the results were very surprising. Anderson states the following:

Thomas Chesney, a Lecturer in Information Systems at the Nottingham University Business School, published the results of his own Wikipedia study in the most recent edition of the online journal First Monday, and he came up with a surprising conclusion: experts rate the articles more highly than do non-experts. (Anderson)

            Chesney’s whole goal for the experiment was not only to see if Wikipedia was credible enough, but to also see how many people find what they say is accurate:

This less-than-intuitive finding is the conclusion of a study in which Chesney had 55 graduate students and research assistants examine one Wikipedia article apiece. Each participant was randomly placed into one of two groups: group one read articles that were in their field of study, while group two read randomly-assigned articles. Respondents were asked to identify any errors that they found. Those in the expert group ranked their articles as generally credible, higher than those evaluated by the non-experts. (Anderson)

When Chesney was finished with his experiment, the results were surprising to him because the non-experts rated some articles to not be credible just because some of the information seemed to be unfamiliar to them. Chesney came to find out that Wikipedia is credible, but used their information with caution because one never knows when small mistakes may be made.

The last reason why Wikipedia is a credible source is because on the site, many of the articles are locked. This means that people or other users are unable to change what is written. By having articles locked, there is a less possible chance of having errors in what the articles say. Many people argue that Wikipedia isn’t credible just because you can change information in the articles that are written. What they don’t realize is most of the articles are locked for the reason that Wikipedia doesn’t want to have its users read the wrong information. This helps Wikipedia prevent false information from being spread around by unknowledgeable users.

From the reasons already stated, which are continuity, reliability, credibility, it is evident that Wikipedia takes care in what information is placed on its website. Wikipedia does give utmost attention to making sure all facts and other data are correct or corrected in order to leave nothing to chance for its readers to come away with any false information. This website strives to maintain its credibility through thorough and timely investigation of anything written in its articles.