Weblog of Suinbayeva Aigerim

Wikipedia October 10, 2007

Today in class we were asked to visit two online encyclopedias: Britannica and Wikipedia. I visited Wikipedia. Previously I used Wikipedia only for entertainment and didn’t try to look it carefully and find out all the possibilities to add or adit information in there. Firstly, I have created my own account to receive full opportunities in working on the site. After signing in I found tyhe following text: “Wikipedia is an encyclopedia collaboratively written by many of its readers. It is a special type of website, called a wiki, that makes collaboration easy. Many people are constantly improving Wikipedia, making thousands of changes an hour, all of which are recorded on article histories and recent changes. Inappropriate changes are usually removed quickly, and repeat offenders can be blocked from editing. If you add new material to Wikipedia, please provide references. Facts that are unreferenced are routinely removed from the encyclopedia.”

So here we can see that it is not so easy to add own information as we thought previously. The change and adding of information is protected by several rules and verything would be removed from the ebcyclopedia if the person who adds does not follow instructions.