Saturday, November 24, 2007

Thing 8 - Wiki's

Hello,

Today I'm going to talk about wiki's and how they work.

A wiki is basically a website that anyone can contribute to. The most famous is Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia that has over 2 million articles and it's growing every day. Because articles are written and maintained by individuals who do not need to prove their expertise on the subject that they are writing about, articles are prone to misinformation and even vandalism.

Wiki's work on the idea of "Radical Trust" which is to say that we trust that the community will work together, for the most part, to ensure that the the information that is given is correct. I think this is a great idea but I would never stake my life on anything that was printed on wikipedia. For one thing, we don't know when the article was last edited. If someone who was trying to be malicious edited an article minutes before you looked at it, the community would not have time to correct the misinformation before you view it. This would be a bit of an extreme coincidence, but it can happen. The fact that an article could house misinformation means that it cannot be trusted completely.

Now I use wikipedia quite often and I trust (radically) that what I am reading is correct because (1) I don't actually believe there are enough people out there who are actively trying to post misinformation on wikipedia and (2) when I use wikipedia it is not generally going to harm me in any way if the information that I get is incorrect. So when I use wikipedia, I generally believe what I read but always with the knowledge that it might not be 100% accurate.

Till next time,
Cheers!

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