Who Writes Wikipedia? Should We Become One of Them?
“In your assignment, do not use Wikipedia as your sources, not even take a look at it.” Every time when my high school teachers assigned projects that included possible web search, they would emphasize Wikipedia is not the site you would want to go to. What is it that makes Wikipedia not reliable? If you take a look at any Wikipedia page, there are always a list of references at the bottom of the page. Wouldn’t it make this source look reliable then? So I guess the next and the most important question we want to ask is who are those people referenced these resources and write up and edit Wikipedia?
Wikipedia answered, “You do! Yes, anyone can be bold and edit an existing article or create a new one, and volunteers do not need to have any formal training.” People are are editing articles on Wikipedia, usually called “Wikipedian” come from different countries so that they can edit articles in different languages. Aaron Swartz examined how Wikipedia articles were written through different kinds of programming to compute the number of counts and number of edits. The conclusion is that there are a group of 1400 obsessed freaks who do little else but contribute to the site. However, there are still a lot of Wikipedians who may only edit an article once. In fact, intelligent geeks have done some computation and research on it. Usually a Wikipedian may put in a chunk of information to one article (this may look like one edit), then one of those primary editors will look at it and tweak it and standardize the site (this may look like many edits). Therefore, Wikipedia is written by all of us as it is using everyone as their think tank, but there is this group of people who refines sites and make them look better and put them under a better category.
Now as Wikipedia’s authors’ masks cleared up. We may think that if I should join this and become a Wikipedian. My personal answer is YES. BBC published an article that interviewed many men and women who have been actively editing Wikipedia. One women made her first edit with the following reason, “editing the article gave me confidence that it’s possible for errors to be corrected, that Wikipedia isn’t just a bunch of goofy people making up stuff.” If we want high school teachers to stop asking their students not to use Wikipedia, then we should all start looking at Wikipedia articles and be meticulous and confident to edit them and make them more accurate. Therefore, the quality of Wikipedia will be improved progressively and so does its reliability.
