When
using sites like Yahoo, Google and Wikipedia, I use them for different things.
For instance, using Yahoo, I would look at there website to find out the news. For Google it would be for
there search engine. Wikipedia is used differently for me because of the
information it brings. If I were to search “2013” in Wikipedia it takes me to a
part of there site which would allow me to look at, films, music, television,
and events for 2013. It is a great way to find out information that normal
could take a site like Google a couple minutes of reading different websites to
find out. Wikipedia gives users the information with a link attached to it.
This shows that the Internet has evolved
into a great way to accomplish different aspects to obtain information through
different databases and a great way to get ideas. This can also be known as
crowdsourcing. With this, there are many benefits and drawbacks and for this
weeks blog I will talk about if the pros and cons change on the kind knowledge
given from crowdsourcing.
For now I will start with talking about the benefits of
crowdsourcing knowledge. The benefit of having a crowdsourcing website for
example Wikipedia is that it provides a great way of finding things that we may
not know. “Wikipedia is now the Web’s third most popular news and
information source, with more unique visitors than Yahoo News, MSNBC, AOL News,
and CNN (ComScore, 2006). Wikipedia’s English-language version doubled in size
in 2006 and now has more than 1 million articles. By this measure, it is almost
12 times larger than the print version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
It has more than 100,000 contributors writing in 200 languages (“Wiki
Principle,” 2006)(Royal. C and Kapila. D, 2009).” The reason that Wikipedia is
very useful is because it provides different outlooks into how they get the
information. Wikipedia provides users with personal information, achievements,
and other news depending on the person/thing you look up.
With sites
like Wikipedia there are many drawbacks. Jensen. R (2012) writes in his article
about Wikipedia fights the war of 1812 that “our main concern here, however, is
not with who uses Wikipedia, but with how its articles on military history get
written, using the “war of 1812” article as a case study. Wikipedia represents
a radical new way to write history: “crowdsourcing””. With that any person that
is interested in writing a column on someone’s Wikipedia page can edit and put
false information into it. This shows that “There are several unwarranted
premises underlying this claim. First, the authors of Wikinomics and ‘We-Think’
assume that all users who contribute content are (equally) creative and that
their motivations for contributing articulate the same expressive desire (Dijck.
J, and Nieborg. D, 2009).” Also with these websites even though they might be
very useful, you cannot use for academic sources!! Sorry students :(.
References
Royal, C. & Kapila, D. (2009). What's on Wikipedia, and What's Not . . . ?: Assessing Completeness of Information. Social Science Computer Review. 27, 1. pp 138-148.
Note: don't worry about the statistics and methodology in Royal & Kapila (skim it, this isn't a stats course). Focus on the introduction, discussion, and conclusion.
Jensen, R. (2012). Military History on the Electronic Frontier: Wikipedia Fights the War of 1812. Journal of Military History. 76, 1. pp 1165-1182
Picture above courtesy of: http://thesocialkraken.wordpress.com/2013/02/page/2/
Picture below courtesy of:http://www.businessesgrow.com/2011/08/31/the-top-five-crowdsourcing-mega-trends/
I agree that crowd sourcing is a useful tool for getting a generalized opinion on a subject, but at the same time it can be skewed to produce an opinion or falsified information that the majority would agree with. I think in order to be academically useable, the author or editor must have some sort of qualification. Wikipedia in the globalized community allows for a singular identity for a subject across many cultures. Our generation relies on the information of others to the point where we know longer know what to believe. because of this it's best that written research be kept to the professionals.
ReplyDeleteCrowdsourcing is a very useful tool. But I dislike how Wikipedia manages it. The fact that they do not welcome the common certified writer to post their views of the subject is disturbing. There are a lot of liars within the world that will change facts for an obscure reward. I feel the changes should be more indirect. Example they should allow requests of changes of their subjects and sent to a common editor which whom analyzes these facts and allows only what is true to be posted onto the sites pages. It is a globalized community and thus is vulnerable to motivated discrepancies.
ReplyDeleteI agree that it is easy to obtain information using Wikipedia since it groups topics together versus going through different websites in a Google search result to find relevant information. I always knew that anyone could edit a Wikipedia page but never had any scepticism with the information that was written on it. It is always quicker and easy to solve an argument by getting the facts straight from Wikipedia rather than searching Google results.
ReplyDeleteI like the crowdsourcing picture you used as well!