Wikiality

What is a wiki? Who creates them? Why use them? Who edits them?
A 'wiki' is a collection of web pages that are designed and created to allow anyone with to contribute to the changes they wish to make. Wikis are created by anyone that wishes to do so. They sometimes have useful information and they are very easy to use. Sometimes, the content on the pages is not right and therefore is not a good source of information. One of the most famous wikis today is Wikipedia. For this cite all you have to do is create a username/account and sign up. After this step you simply sing up and edit the page in any way they want to.

What is your task? Why is it important for you to learn about Wikipedia?
In our IT class we are doing a project on ‘Wikiality’: How they first appeared, who uses them, who edits them etc. For us it is very important to learn about this because we are the ones that use Wikipedia, Wiki-answers and other types for references. Most of the time, we do not know if the content on the page was edited or not. It is pretty hard to see on certain pages that we do not know much about.

Where does Wikipedia get its information?
Mostly Wikipedia gets the information from other websites and people cite that as a reference in the page. Sometimes people that edit the pages randomly type anything that is either relevant or not to the title/topic.

Who is in charge of deciding what goes into an article and what gets removed from an article?
The people that decide what is going to be saved on the page are the ones that edited that certain article themselves. They can write whatever they wish to but it is very likely that the content of the article will be changed in a few minutes. Therefore anyone with an account on Wikipedia can go into a certain article and edit it any possible way they wish to.

If there is some debate about whether a particular bit of information should or should not be included in an article, what is the process for deciding?
I am pretty sure that these debates, on what is going to be saved in an article, happen very often. The process for deciding is nothing but people with accounts logging in and editing that certain page as they wish to. For example if there was an article about religion and someone logged in and wrote in that article that “religion is nothing but fiction. There is no God because I am the greatest”. If another person saw this they would edit this article because they did not agree with the information given. This could go on for a long time and there would be more than two people involved in it.
But also a possible way is just seeing the difference in the number of sources. Whoever has more
sources in their reference part, they get to publish their article.

How reliable do you think Wikipedia actually is?
As I mentioned above, there are many articles with the proper information. This information is usually found on other websites which are usually cited in the ‘reference’ box.
Whenever I am doing a project on something, most of the time I go to Wikipedia too. I look for that certain information on Wikipedia and most of the time the content is correct. But there were a few times where the article was completely wrong and the information is clearly incorrect mostly because the person who edited the page wrote about something totally different and clearly wrong.
So sometimes Wikipedia is a reasonable source, sometimes it is not. In my opinion the more famous the article is, the chance of the content being wrong is quite low.

How would you know whether a particular article really is accurate?
Whenever we search for something on Wikipedia, it is important that we know at least something about the topic so when we use the information we know what the article is about. When I use Wikipedia, it is always after I know a little bit about the topic. This way if something was written in a article we would know if it was correct or not. Another way to check if that particular article is correct, is to search for the topic on the internet or ask someone.

How would you go about discovering whether an article contains inaccurate information?
After using Wikipedia it is important to check the information on the internet, in books, with your teacher or anyone that could be familiar with that certain topic. Well this is what I usually do.


For this project we were separated into pairs and my partner was Nandy.
As for the steps, firstly we thought of a few topics that we were familiar with and that were most likely to be wrong. Our list was mainly related to Mongolia, Bosnia and things that we are interested in. For the second step, we searched for these articles on Wikipedia and read them all in order to find an error. Only one of them had an error and it was the ISU article. The article states that in ISU we are offered an U.S. curriculum but not anymore. It has been changed to the IB.

“The program of study used is based upon model U.S. curricula, extended for international use. The teaching methodology stresses activity-based learning, and the children are encouraged to enjoy and participate in the investigation of all areas of study.” Well the error is that there is no U.S. curricula anymore but instead ISU offers and IB program which contains of the MYP (Middle Years Program) and DP (Diploma Program).