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).

As I've already stated, many elitists of education find Wikipedia deplorable, but have they checked their own sources to prove this opinion? A World History teacher says to her students “Ok, you've got this big 100 point project due by the end of the month, you have to site at least 8 sources, and I'm only letting two of them be from Wikipedia”. She later goes on to tell her students that she knew one of the current Supreme Court Justices and she was reading his Wikipedia article, and to her dismay she found three mistakes at the bottom of the page. This was the reason her students could only use Wikipedia twice in their oral World History presentations. Many educators, such as this one, find Wikipedia to be unsuitable for education purposes because of undependability. A better alternative to this supporter of education would be the revered and costly website Encyclopedia Britannica, right? Incorrect, according to the British Journal “Nature”, Britannica had almost as many lies, factual errors, or omissions as Wikipedia did as they conducted a small research project using only those two encyclopedias as sources. Although they found that Wikipedia did have more errors with 162, Britannica came in a close second with 123 problems (BBC). This shows that quite often the Internet, which is hailed as the greatest unlimited source of information, isn't always correct even with so-called reliable databases such as Britannica. So therefore reliable databases are almost as bad as Wikipedia. Britannica is still better to use than Wikipedia because it has less mistakes, but it's still pretty worthless if it even has one. These mistakes are probably the result of amateurs running both sites.

Andrew Keen, a huge critic of Wikipedia makes the point that amateurs are ruining our culture. Andrew Keen has a Master's Degree in political science and in his book he blames the Internet, blogs, and user-edited websites of destroying our culture and once again making our society stupider. Andrew Keen went on Stephen Colbert's television show to talk about his book “The Cult of the Amateur” (Television). He brings up the point that we believe in the factoids put on the internet, like Wikipedia coming up on Google, as reality because we don't look anywhere else for good, solid, information about the past, present, and future of our world from intelligent people who actually know what they're talking about. He suggests that a group of experts should have a journalistic webpage to tell the real facts that people want to know about like info on Aristotle, the Chinese Civil War, and English grammar. And there should also be Wikipedia-like information such as Rolling Stones info, details about the villains from Batman, porn, or how the famous author Ray Bradbury said that public schools teach way too many factoids in their daily curriculums.

Ray Bradbury has many insightful points on education. On a video interview with Ray Bradbury, he said that all the information that people place value on today (excluding the areas of Math and Science) like the names of famous people, dates of history, or when a book was written, for example all of the information that Wikipedia offers, is completely irrelevant. All that unreliable information that Wikipedia offers and people have been arguing and scuffling about is completely worthless to the research projects that students have to do because it doesn't really teach you anything with substance. The names of people like Napoleon, Martin Luther, and Jesus are worthless if you don't know who they were, what they stood for, and why they were considered great men. The names and dates of wars like World War II and how it started in September 1939 is worthless if you don't bring up the fact that it started because of neglecting Germany and their quest for power because of it. None of the names, dates, and other information that schools present to their students and actually expect them to learn makes them think. The lessons that schools have their students complete are often centered on learning the information that Wikipedia easily offers without providing a lesson of how it applies to them individually. It doesn't make them think, they just learn the information, and puke it back up because it provides them no enriching thought-provoking substances. The information that schools have their students learn is basically grain alcohol, but to contrast if the lessons actually made the students think, the ethanol would instantly transform into healthy green vegetables. So to finally summarize, Wikipedia is criticized because education elites of today want the children to learn information from reliable sources when it's completely irrelevant to them anyway.

To summarize, Wikipedia is an over hated website that provides a mountain of information for free. It gets criticized because it's supposedly making the world a dumber place to live in thanks to children getting their information from unreliable sources. In my opinion, if there was a free (emphasize heavily on free) and reliable encyclopedia today that offered information on anything you could think of and today's education system taught students to think, we'd be all set. The Internet will remain a powerful tool for the advancement of humankind and we need to use it correctly if we are to survive. Wikipedia is a brilliant idea, but having it freely changed everyday is using the idea incorrectly. If we use it correctly and this era is referred to as the “Information Age” and knowledge is the collection of information, maybe the next era will be the "Knowledgeable Age”. Of course by then we"ll be smarter and there will be a cooler name for it.