Wikipedia: college professors frown upon it while university students panic when the site goes down.
This online encyclopedia has come a long way since its debut on January 12, 2001. In allowing individuals all around the world the permission to edit and change information on the website, it epitomizes the ideal of participatory journalism. With over 100,000 regular contributors, cited by the Sydney Morning Herald, Wikipedia encourages it users to be bold in writing their posts. Due to the mass traffic that surrounds Wikipedia, individuals are more likely to get up-to-date information on a recent event since almost anyone can contribute to the news stories. The consumers of the media can now be the producers. One example that highlights this is the story of Natalie Martin. On the day of the Virginia Tech Massacre, Martin updated the page minute by minute and the site soon became one of the most popular news sources focused on this tragic event. Martin live edited the page by deleting offensive comments and bias.
As a news aggregator, Wikipedia focuses on the facts and concerns itself with taking out bias from stories. Personally, I think it’s naïve to believe that one can truly write something “unbiased”. Obviously there are some right or left wing news sources that are more blatant with their partiality in comparison to Wikipedia but to go around pronouncing, “We are an unbiased news source” seems too simplistic. It’s obviously easier said than done. In fact, Conservapedia, a website created by “self-described American conservative Christians, Andrew and Philip Schlafly” counters against Wikipedia’s so-called “liberal bias”. Granted, after actually looking through Conservapedia, it’s clear that Wikipedia is the more neutral source of information.
One paradox that I discovered with Wikipedia is that this ideal of allowing anyone to edit serves as both its’ forte and downfall. With more people changing and moderating information, the probability of creating mistakes increases. Johnathan Dee, a novelist and contributor to New York Times Magazine, wrote an article titled, All the News that’s Fit to Print Out which highlights Wikipedia’s disposition to mistakes (or what he calls “deliberate acts of vandalism”) Dee continues on to talk about the diversity in contributors or “Wikipedians”. In the introduction, he writes about how a regular contributor CltFn created a page right after news broke loose about the arrest of half a dozen Muslim men planning to attack Fort Dix. After spending countless hours live editing throughout the day, CltFn announces that they’re “Off to bed”. The reader then learns that CltFn needs to ‘go to bed’ since they have to attend yet another day at High School.
When I was in High School, I was concerned with tanning on the beach and watching Friends re-runs, not the “Fort Dix Terror Plot”. It’s just remarkable to see the platform Wikipedia has given human beings to be able to report on issues occurring half way across the world, even if the reporting is happening simultaneously with Chemistry and Physics homework.