According to Wikipedia, Wikipedia is a multi-lingual, web-based, encyclopedia project operated by the non-profit organization, the Wikipedia Foundation. Many Wikipedians enjoy this website shown by the millions of dollars raised by annual Wikipedia Fundraisers. On this website, all content is free and there are over 8.3 million articles in over 250 different languages (Wikipedia). This popular database that often comes up as the first link presented when you google anything has possibly more information than any other encyclopedia in the world. Yet for some reason many educators, critics, and scholars find this website unethical and unreliable because it can be edited and changed by anyone. My question for all those interested in Wikipedia: Why is Wikipedia criticized so often and are these critics just?
First, let's look at what the website looks like before we talk about the criticism. The website is www.wikipedia.org, which will take you to the main page. The main page has a small globe of Greek letters fitting together like a puzzle piece at the top left corner of the screen and the rest of the main page has various news articles. On the middle left of the page has Wikipedia's search engine and below that shows the different languages you can search with. Along with the main page, all of the articles are colored mostly gray and white with black lettering. All of the individual articles are changed and edited everyday by online groups or just random people.
The main debate as to why Wikipedia is so despised is because random people can change whatever article's information to whatever they want. Stephen Colbert, a popular comedian, who runs a satirical portrayal of T.V. news programs on Comedy Central asked Wikipedia users to say that the average number of African Elephants has tripled in the last six months. This change was done and other edits like this occur everyday. As I stated earlier, Wikipedia has more information than any other encyclopedia on the Internet and since people can change the information on it, it becomes unreliable because you can't defer from what is true and what isn't without checking your sources. Wikipedia often comes up on the most popular search engine, Google's first few web links whenever people search for anything online. Since Google is the main research tool web surfers use to look for information online and Wikipedia has become its main provider of information because of its abundant pool of knowledge, the despised Wikipedia has therefore became the Internet's main provider of information. Because Wikipedia is so unreliable and so many people use it, critics have begun to demean the database because they don't want the world using bad information to advance the population's knowledge. They especially don't want high school and college students using it because it will degrade their brains. Since the children are the future, it will begin the human races journey of devolution. All of these criticisms and points point at the quality of Wikipedia, but they don't talk about the one thing it has down, the quantity of information.
You can search for almost anything on Wikipedia and find an article or at least something relating to it. When you do find the sought after article, it has many other links to other articles relating to it within the words printed on the page. Such as if you searched education, the words teaching, learning, and skills are all underlined and colored blue to symbolize a hyperlink to the article defining it. Wikipedia is well organized, free, and also easy to use. It has many different applications for the constructive purposes of advancing knowledge.
There are a wide variety of articles on Wikipedia, some are constructive, some are entertaining, but do any of them actually have a point? Examples of good articles you could find would be like quotes from philosophers such as Aristotle, research info on when the Chinese Civil War was started, or the difference of its and it's. Those are all very intelligent, constructive articles to look up, but there are also many less enlightening articles to find and these articles are more likely searched for than the latter. For example, when the Rolling Stones recorded their first album, all the names of the villains from Batman, or the number ten most visited article on Wikipedia “List of Female Porn Stars” (Wikipedia). The reason it's so popular to most people is because it's an easy way to find information on anything you want. It's not easy to find organized info on the Rolling Stones or Batman. It's very easy to find information on female porn stars, but let's not go into that. It doesn't really matter to say Wikipedia is a bad source of information because the top searched for articles on the website prove that web surfers don't often look for quotes from wise people, how certain wars have started, or how to become a better writer. They look for factoids about trivial information that most scholars aren't interested in. Those factoids aren't not important, the factoids of society just don't contribute much to intelligence, they're entertaining, but they won't bring out a society of massive ignorance like the many teachers, intellectuals, and the editor of Encyclopedia Britannica, Dale Hoiberg, says it will (Wikipedia).
