Wikipedia
It is common to hear
people say “Everything is on the internet” or “Don’t know? Look it up”. This is
in fact quite true, and dare I say that although many hail education as ‘the
great equalizer’, the internet is as great or even greater at affording
opportunities to practically anyone who has access to it.
Sadly the internet is
not the all-honest, easy-access repository of endless knowledge that one might
hope for, instead we have the next best thing: Wikipedia. It’s free and easily
accessible, it has published probably millions of relatively easy-to-read
articles on almost every subject of interest that you can possibly think of [1].
There is a serious catch
however: Wikipedia sources its contents from the public. Which means that in
theory anybody can post and edit content that may or may not contain
inaccuracies and personal biases. Or at least this was how things began in the
olden days of the site; now as Wikipedia continues to gain relevance in the
online republic, certain restrictions and/or reviews are being put in place by
the management to ensure the reliability of the site’s content.
There is also a sort of
sad side to all the generous work that the people behind Wikipedia does:
despite being the go-to place for everybody looking to gain a deeper
understanding on something, it is still generally regarded as an unreliable
source of knowledge. Try putting Wikipedia on your bibliography and you will
most probably get flunked. It’s like looking at the poor boy in the schoolyard
that gives all his lunch money away, yet still can’t get anyone to sit with
him.
Maybe that’s just the
role that Wikipedia is meant to play: to provide a quick and reasonably
detailed introduction to anything that we may want to read on, and then it
becomes our responsibility to dig deeper for greater knowledge and with more
reputable sources.
Reference
[1] Wikipedia. Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia
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