In today’s technological driven world information about anything can be found on the internet and with the relatively new format of information distribution know as Wiki, it is much easier and faster than ever before. But like the past methods of information Wiki has both is advantages and disadvantages.
Wikipedia is a public encyclopedia written by the community for the community. Any additional edits are allowed by anonymous or registered users depending on the level of security set by the original creator of the article. But because of this, Wiki articles are easily vandalized by malicious users. To counter this effect several members within the community have made it their goal to stop these vandals in their own free time to ensure the rest of the community to be able to receive factual information of what they are looking for. There are millions of Wiki users all over the world to contribute or vandalize the new form of information distribution. Because of this, Wikipedia has been open topic for discussion among critics for reason that anything in Wikipedia can not be valued as a solid source of information because anyone including anonymous users can put in false, derogatory, and other types of vandalism which Wikipedia has acknowledged and defined within their own site.
But even so people all over the world are still using Wikipedia despite the criticism. Learning from their past mistakes Wikipedia has put up countermeasures to prevent incidents of vandalism as well as the community of Wikipedia users personally donating their time to create task forces with other users to prevent, identify, locate and punish users with malicious intents who vandalize articles for their own amusement.
Even with the disadvantages people all over the world are still using Wikipedia as one of their main source of information to whatever they need to learn something about. If you type a candidate for the Presidential Election in a search engine such as Yahoo or Google a Wikipedia article about the candidate will be one of the links in the front page. Despite all the criticisms Wikipedia has received, Wikipedia has won many awards from many prestigious award functions that relate to the internet such as the Golden Nica and the Judge’s Webby Award.
And even with its millions of users, the community of Wiki users is growing at an alarming rate with more than half of America’s internet users having used Wikipedia and it is continuously rising. And with its rising popularity people all over the world are creating their own Wikis containing information that they wish to distribute out to the world such as television shows, hobbies and other topics of interest. And creating these sites are easy because of the GNU license, people are allowed to use coding for free as long as they don’t make a profit with the public code. And with Wiki gaining more and more popularity, it is only matter of time that personal Wiki pages about the users become the new FaceBook or MySpace in which it will officially dominate the internet.
The Presence of Wiki
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