Reading Asssignment #2

According to Wikipedia's story on itself, it is the biggest collection of general knowledge ever compiled. It has even surpassed the 600 year old Chinese Yongle Encyclopedia. Ever since Wikipedia came into existence in 2001 its popularity exponentially grew, it was estimated that there was about 2,200 articles added to this world wide encyclopedia every day. But up until about 2 years ago, this rapid growth suddenly declined, articles weren't being published, people became reluctant to fix errors or add their own 2 cents worth of wisdom. Its biggest peak was in March 2007 with 820,000 contributors but hasn't seen anything close to those numbers since then. Volunteers have been trying to fix this problem by means of expanding their fan base, since women make up only 13% of contributors, and also by making the site more trustworthy. They have been working on putting in a layer of control regarding actually living people. The way it is now people can say what they want freely about anything. But this plan will only go into action once the Wikipedia administrator passes it. But this is just the problem, it has been reported that Wikipedia's fuel for striving is the chaos that came along with it and the freedom to say and post what you wanted. But with freedom to post and edit what you wanted too, it came to the point where everyone posted storied about everything and people just lost interest in continuing it once the main articles became published. There is also research to suggest that Wikipedia will not make it for another 10 years or so. With Wikipedia's troubles it suggests that the internet has limits too, which is when a community gets too big, it becomes chaotic and dysfunctional.






I personally like Wikipedia, while it is true that the sources cant not be truly reliable due to the fact that anyone can edit any article at any time. However, it is very helpful when you need to look up information about a certain topic and need a quick summary of what it is or how something works. I was also very surprised to see that Wikipedia is expected to cease existence within another decade or so because I for one thought that Wikipedia would be around for a substantial amount of time. It has easy access for anyone with internet and it is easy to search topics and it also contains information on just about any subject you could think of.