Comment on a Teammates blog post

First of all, I wanted to say to Kathleen that I really appreciate her attempt to try and bring my webpage up in the rankings on googles results for stiuqxela. I will return the favor at the end of this post.

Out of all the articles that come into our Bloglines account, I found it funny that the one that Kathleen wrote about on her blog also is one that caught my eye simply because of its title: Wikipedia: Just how Popular is it?. I'm not saying I read the article, just that I noticed it. But now that Kathleen wrote about it and I have to write about her post, now is the time to read the article. First of all, the line in the beginning of the Global Neighborhoods post states that one-third of Americans say they have consulted Wikipedia. For some reason I feel that this number is very low. Is this 1/3 of people in general or 1/3 who frequently use search on the internet. Wikipedia is often times the number one search result on Google and it's hard to avoid, even my Mom uses Wikipedia and I dont even think she knows what it is and what it's all about. If I had to guess, I would say that more than 1/3 of people who use internet search on a regular basis have come in contact with Wikipeida for sure, its inevitable.

Although Kathleen stated that she stays away from Wikipedia when searching on the internet, I find that I am drawn to it. Wikipedia is so easy to use and it's so convenient, it seems as though it has everything! I agree with Kathleens statement that Wikipedia has a bad reputation because of its quality of anyone can change it, like we are doing for this course, however I feel that there are enough fanatics out there that are dedicated to keeping Wikipedia's content valid. At times when writing a research paper I feel that citing Wikipedia as a source creates a sense of laziness and incorrect information in the paper, however, this is usually not the case. Although many teachers frown on the use of Wikipedia of a source, Rubel states flat out that he used it as primary resource when writing his renown book "Naked Conversations". Now that's showing is trust in the wiki system.

Overall, I feel that I see where Kathleen is coming from in her response to the article, but at the same time I feel that I, like Rubel, have faith in the validity of Wikipedia. Rubel mentions something called "Wisdom of Crowds" which to me seems like a term to describe the synergy that exists among Wikipedia editors. As I stated before, although there may be many editors that do not know what they are talking about on Wikipeida, there are plenty of regulators and fanatics concerned with keeping their favorite articles updated. People make mistakes, and other people are annoying and write completely rediculous information on their articles (I came across this situation when editing my article about Medfield, MA). However, I have also had personal experience with someone coming in and editing the work that I had just added. Even though it was only spelling and gramatical errors that they corrected, this shows that someone was regulating the content of the article making sure the information was right.

On the other hand, I agree with Kathleen in that it is impossible to say that Wikipeida is 100% right. Although there are regulators of the content, they do not edit the additions to articles immediately so there is a chance that someone would come to the article and see the incorrect information and take it for truth. Eventually the error would be corrected but it might be too late and before you know it some kid has ridiculous information in his paper and gets a bad grade. Kathleen is right, if you are going to use Wikipedia as a source, which is perfectly fine, just make sure you find other information that supports what you found.

Obviously, the use of Wikipedia is a controversial topic in the world of works cited and teacher preferences. While there are teachers such as Kathleen's that prohibits the use of this online information database, I have had teachers that encourage its use. It all really depends on what that particular teacher knows about wikis. This was a great little blog post that Rubel made and it might actually do some good if teachers like Kathleen's Communications in Business professor read this blog post and saw that even authors of some of our generations greatest books used Wikipedia as their primary source. Maybe this would change the world's opinion of the website and increase the number of users to over 1/3 of Americans.

And as usual, some stiuqxela's: stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiquxela stiuqxela. And for more on stiuqxela you should check out Kathleens stiuqxela challenge attempt