How to Make the Most of Wikipedia Page Template for Google Docs?
To make the most of Wikipedia writing services during your newly business development campaign, it is useful to take the time to understand its principle. Indeed, it is by knowing perfectly the limits of its relevance that one will be able to effectively use the famous encyclopedia. Its fundamental principle is as much its advantage as its main flaw. Let’s see all this and take advantage of a particularly effective user guide for all information seekers on the web looking for Wikipedia template for google docs.
Wikipedia, the Online Knowledge Reference
In fact, no need to introduce Wikipedia. The free encyclopedia, as it calls itself, has become the benchmark for “online knowledge” for a large majority of web users. It is true that the main search engines, Google in the lead, favor it in the results pages.
Wikipedia is a multi-million page site, and it is referenced by an equally impressive number of websites. It is therefore not surprising to find it at the top of the results, even if the article selected by the search engine is not necessarily the most complete or the best written.
Let us now see the limits of its relevance. They are inherent in its fundamental principle. We will deduce from it a “user manual” in order to get the most out of it.
Objective of this practical sheet
Note
A Wikipedia resource is not reliable in principle and deserves to be compared with other sources.
Advice
Do not hesitate to closely study the Wikipedia files corresponding to themes that you have mastered in order to better assess the quality of the encyclopedia for the subject under study.
Risks of failure
Use low quality articles as a reference.
The founding thesis of the Wikipedia phenomenon
The Wikipedia project is obviously one of the most beautiful creations on the web. The initial idea is quite simple. We all have knowledge on specific topics and some of us want to share it. From the outset, the project relied on them to constitute what has become the largest multilingual encyclopedia. The success was dazzling. In a few years, the encyclopedia acquired its letters of nobility. Today it is an essential reference for knowledge available on the web.
Unlike the famous encyclopedia by Diderot and d’Alembert, a flagship of the Age of Enlightenment, Wikipedia contributors are overwhelmingly anonymous.
Either way, no article is signed by a single author, simply because no article is written by a single author. Everyone is free to make their contribution, if only by correcting a spelling, syntax or misinterpretation.
This depersonalized collaborative principle is also the angle of attack of the main criticisms. And it is from the angle of criticism that we will approach this study in order to better understand its limits for the self-study project. But let’s start with some numbers.
Wikipedia in five figures
Five digits to better understand.
1. Size
Wikipedia has more than 2 million articles. The international Wikipedia offers more than 30 million articles written in 280 languages.
2. The quality
About 2000 articles benefit from the label “Quality article” or 0.1%. More than 3000 articles are classified as “good articles” or about 0.15% of all publications in other languages Wikipedia.
For example, the article “Grand Cachalot” is a quality article
3. Users
3.3 million Users of the encyclopedia are registered; they are the “Wikipedia’s”. These are users who have opened an account. Wikipedia receives many more visitors. The international version, that is to say all languages combined, sees daily visits from more than 500 million Internet users.
4. Contributors
20,000 contributors enrich Wikipedia and make at least one modification per month. 800 of them are very active and make more than 100 contributions per month.
5. The administrators
160 administrators ensure the proper functioning of the encyclopedia using a set of very specific technical tools.
Some details to better understand the terminology used
Quality item
The articles benefiting from this exceptional label meet very specific criteria: “they are well written, complete, reasoned and neutral”.
Contributor
He is a “Wikipedia writer and editor” who makes at least one contribution per month.
Contribution
A contribution can be a simple correction or a creation of articles by self or any Wikipedia page creation service.
Active contributor
They are of course enthusiasts who anonymously devote several hours a week to this solitary work.
Administrator
They are volunteers elected by the community. They have a battery of tools to ensure the maintenance of the encyclopedia.
A fantastic encyclopedia but uneven quality
As its name suggests, Wikipedia is a “wiki” type. That is to say that we can write or correct a text already present, leaving as a trace of its passage only his nickname or his Internet connection address (IP address). By dint of writing and rewriting, the truth will emerge.
As a result, the quality is quite uneven to say the least. The subjects which do not interest many Internet users, occasional apprentice editors, contain many omissions, even errors other articles, by the dint of rewriting are totally unstructured and of very poor editorial quality.
Moderators
The moderators understood the problem well and issued drafting rules. Articles which comply with them benefit from the mention:
“You are reading a quality article”.
Unfinished articles
On the other hand, the very many unfinished articles which do not respect the rules of writing are decorated with a banner in order to warn the reader such as:
“This article is an outline concerning the economy “,
Or a more precise warning: “This article does not cite its sources enough”, or “The form or content of this article needs to be verified”.
These are only examples, the knowledgeable editors of Wikipedia use many other types of warnings intended as much for ordinary readers as for the contributors of the encyclopedia.
Google can’t read!
Unfortunately, for the information prospector using search engines, Google, like Bing or Yahoo, cannot read. They therefore do not see these caveats and classify documents that are incomplete, poorly written or with questionable sources at the top of the results. Despite their glaring inadequacies, they sometimes fully comply with the relevance criteria of the main search engines.
It is indeed necessary to leave time for the encyclopedia but, in the meantime, the incomplete or sloppy articles are also online as well as the reference articles.
Can we always be satisfied with a neutral point of view?
Neutrality in question
From its inception, the founders of Wikipedia decided that each subject would be treated on a single page. Jimmy Wales, initiator of the encyclopedia, specifies however that it is advisable, for the subjects susceptible to controversy, to quote the competing theses in a spirit of neutrality of point of view. This concession implies that, whatever the subject, there would necessarily exist an objective and factual approach which is almost unambiguous.
It is not so simple
Many themes are complex, and we can only understand them by studying closely different theses that do not approach the question from the same angle of attack. They are all admissible from the moment they are documented, argued and signed. Whether it is about the economy, biology (GMOs in particular), ecology (global warming for example), history or politics, just a few themes among many others, s’ to imagine that there may exist a universal and neutral thesis and some minor contradictory points of view leads irreparably to an impoverishment of knowledge.
Wikipedia is a mine of information, but it is a matter of being vigilant, of placing your critical mind on maximum alert in order to draw from it a rich lesson of interest according to the needs of your research.
When properly written, a Wikipedia article is just one resource. If necessary, especially if it deals with a controversial topic, the article will imperatively be compared to other documents of interest.
It is by confronting points of view that one manages to build one’s own knowledge system.
