Embarrassingly enough, I did not understand how Wikipedia worked until I arrived at college and none of my professors would allow me to cite it. The fact that Wikipedia is a collaborative site subject to error was a detail that my high school teachers somehow managed to skip over. I have always used the site as my first resource when I am about to tackle a foreign topic. It is nice to have all of the neat little dates and categories laid out before me on one site. Upon beginning college I was told that I may use it as a resource, but that I could not cite it which still didn't make much sense to me. I didn't understand why Wikipedia was always getting picked on and treated like a lesser specimen. Now that I more fully understand the concept I am able to see the reasons behind its being labeled as not credible.
The back and forth between Wales from Wiki and Cauz from Britannica was pretty entertaining. I loved the musical metaphors that they both came up with to describe their dominance over the other. According to Cauz Wikipedia is what American Idol would be to Juilliard, and from Wales point of view Britannica is what easy listening would be to rock. It was also interesting to learn about the site's terminology such as "wikignome" and "wikitroll". Internet communities have always been something I have never really understood, but they are interesting to observe.
For the longest time, I also didn’t understand why Wikipedia was made out to be some terrible source for information. When I found out that pretty much anyone could make entries, though, I saw the merit in the warnings people had given me. I found the back-and-forth between Cauz and Wales amusing as well. After Cauz made the first musical metaphor, Wales shot another witty musical comparison right back. Another comparison I liked was the one right before the musical metaphors where it talks about the “first-mover advantage” in the thirty-second paragraph. It says, “The over-all effect is jittery, the textual equivalent of a film shot with a handheld camera” (paragraph 32). I can see how, just as a shaking camera can distort what is seen through the lens, people who make minor revisions to someone’s entry can make the text seem distorted. Since the entry contains changes from many different people, the text can seem as if it is jittery and erratically moving from one person’s voice to another. As it said in the same paragraph, “simple fixes often take priority over more complex edits,” so the people who make the changes probably don’t consider making them in a way that matches the original contributor’s style of writing.
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