The second half of The World and Wikipedia: How We Are Editing Reality by Andrew Dalby explains why we love, the chaos behind, and why we trust and do not trust Wikipedia. For why we love Wikipedia the book discusses how it makes everyone as equal, and the fact everyone gets to write about whatever they want. The following chapter is cleverly titled "Chaos and Beyond; or Why We love it Version 2.5." This chapter talks about all the editing wars and vandalism on Wikipedia, but then explains why this also makes a lot of people more interested in Wikipedia. On why people don't trust Wikipedia Dalby writes on the fact that the readers do not know why an author has written the articles they have posted which means they might be biased. When it comes to why we do trust Wikipedia the point that all facts are subjective no matter what encyclopedia one reads is brought up.
The Internet has made it so everyone is a contributor and not just readers or watchers. When it comes to Wikipedia a apparent sixteen year old boy from New Jersey was able to win awards and receive recognition for articles he posted on the British Peerage system. Just like the case of youtube people have been able to be recognized as amazing dances without having to go to school for it or even travel to show off what they can do. In the Ted talk they even mentioned how a gathering of dancers from youtube performed at the Grammies. Even the chaos involved in Wikipedia just showed how much more we love it. Normal encyclopedia's are viewed as borrow, the reason why is because there is no drama. Wikipedia is described in the book as another social networking site where people argue through editing of articles. Like the same reason facebook is popular, Wikipedia allows us to get caught up in the drama of writing an encyclopedia and we cannot seem to get enough of it.
Many worry that our culture will be effected negatively by this because nobody knows the reason why the author of an article posted the article in the first place. This of course causes a lot of people to worry that everyone will be relying on biased information that has been posted on Wikipedia. The fact is though that our culture is already based on biased material. Almost everything can be viewed as subjective. The book talks about how some encyclopedias just credit Edison for the light bulb while others also credit Sir Joseph Swan. Its impossible to write anything without being a hundred percent unbiased, but if an encyclopedia is written by many biased people wouldn't that make it less biased than an encyclopedia written by one person?
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