The book The World and Wikipedia: How We Are Editing Reality by Andrew Dalby attempts to explain how Wikipedia works, where it comes from, and the positive and negative impacts of it. The book begins by giving examples of how contributors to Wikipedia sometimes basically have to compete using their Wikipedia editing skills in order to get the information they want up on the web page. The next chapter gave a history of the encyclopedia, which allowed for a comparison of it to Wikipedia. The reading assigned ended with a chapter on common criticisms of Wikipedia followed by a chapter of why we use it anyway.
The difference between old encyclopedias and the new Wikipedia is that now anybody can update the information inside. The obvious negative part, which is always pointed out, is that the information could possibly be incorrect or bias. A hope of Wikipedia was that experts could be able to update articles relating to things they are good at, but from the first part of the book describing how one edits Wikipedia, it shows that the people who know how to use Wikipedia best, are more likely to get their views uploaded. The positive side of Wikipedia is that the information is not filtered through a select group of people. Just like many other things that have benefited from the Internet, it has given people the choice of what they want to be exposed to (a close example is youtube and hulu when compared to old fashioned television). In order for Wikipedia to become what it is now, it needed people to be willing to post and update articles to help popularize the site. A main contribution to the site was Google putting Wikipedia articles as one of the first things that pop up for certain searches. This idea of a website having so much control as to be able to popularize a different website is a concept brought up in Technopoly. The fact that we are so willing to trust technology without thinking of the consequences greatly affects our culture and our everyday life.
The way most people relate the effects of Wikipedia on American culture is how it has become a way for us to use as a reference source and view as straight fact. This also leads to the complaint that there has been an increase in plagiarism since Wikipedia has been around. The problem with this is not Wikipedia, it is the fact that our culture does not embrace new ideas fast enough and state how this new resource can be beneficial and how we should avoid using it so it will not become harmful. Instead the new technology is shunned, but continues to be used by everyone. This of course is very dangerous because it views the positive ways of using Wikipedia as equal to the negative ways of using Wikipedia (getting incorrect or bias facts).
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