Marcin Otorowski - strona domowa

numer 1 (czerwiec 2007)
A multilingual, free content encyclopedia project, available all over the world – what used to be only a dream some years ago has become a reality since the Wikipedia project was started. Since it was launched, over 7 millions articles have been written, 1.7 million of which are in English.

Wikipedia’s English edition was launched on January 15, 2001. The main idea of the project is to provide valuable and accurate encyclopedia, written not by professionals, but volunteers. Everyone can edit Wikipedia, add information he or she believes are important, remove or correct errors and mistakes. Even the registration is only optional. Although the idea seems to be crazy as people are not always reliable, the life has shown, that it may work quite efficiently.

The great advantage of Wikipedia is, that it is user friendly. Traditional encyclopedias use many abbreviations and short sentences, limited space also does not allow to put all of the information. Wikipedia is different – there are many pictures, graphs, charts and so on, articles are formatted so as to provide user-friendly layout. What’s more, they are connected with other related by the system of wikilinks – so when you are reading about The University of Szczecin you can go to The Faculty of Economics and Management of University of Szczecin by only one mouse click. Articles, that are multilingual have links to articles in other languages (called interwikis) – so after reading about our university you can read about it in German Wikipedia – you only need one click :)

The question is the quality – can it be trusted or not? Well, we can never be sure that content of Wikipedia is error-free, because anyone can write there. However, most of errors are easy to find, and the time between entering and revealing/correcting the entry is sometimes less than a few seconds. There are two important features of MediaWiki – the software which runs all the Wikis – that help to keep the quality and prevent articles from being vandalized. There are the tools for tracking recent changes, and fact, that all of the content of Wikipedia is automatically backed up. It means, that even deleting any article of encyclopedia actually does not remove it from database, so when error or vandalism is noticed, the archive content can be viewed and restored – even if a one-year-old revision is needed.
The things are different, when information are not well-known or articles are not easily verifiable. Some months ago, there were many publications in Polish press, criticizing Polish Wikipedia for the article about Henryk Batuta – a fictional socialist revolutionary and Polish Communist made up as a hoax. The article was created on November 8, 2004, and exposed as a hoax 15 months later when on February 1 2006 it was listed for deletion, which shows a possible danger.

On the other hand, the articles are usually error-free, (although their length may not always be sufficient). What’s more, some of them are really excellent. Such articles like RMS Titanic, Laffer’s curve or Tour de Pologne are really valuable, and the level of their quality is much higher than any of professional encyclopedia can provide.
So, can Wikipedia be used as a reliable source of knowledge? Should we trust its content? Well, my answer is, that it is perfect when we don’t know where to start if we are looking for information. However, just in case, it is good to assume, that the content needs to be verified with some more sources. After all, don’t be afraid of using, and improving Wikipedia :)

Informacje o publikacji

• autor: Marcin Otorowski
• data: kwiecień 2007
• uwagi: artykuł do wydziałowej gazetki “Wykładnik”