The World and Wikipedia Part 1

To me, wikipedia is a truly wonderful tool, both from a learning perspective as well as its general interface. My typical use of the website involves me genuinely trying to find a basic explanation/definiton of an entry, followed by hopping around through links in the website. While this can waste a lot of time, it most certainly feeds an inner hunger for information.
In "The World and Wikipedia," Andrew Dalby takes his readers through a historical timeline of wikipedia, explaining how the website came into existence, through its birth and growth. He compares wikipedia to a traditional encyclopedia, with wikipdia's main difference is that non-expert laymen can freely contribute to any entriy of their choice. The problem arises with reliability, naturally, but also the collaborative project exposes the website to vandalism by contributors who aren't even attempting to sincerely populate an entry. In my opinion though, the former is a bigger issue, because it is much harder to discern between, an ordinary person's real attempt of explanation and that of an expert's, and a shot at humor or strong personal bias and an expert's contribution.
Wikipedia tends to have an emphasis to popular culture. However these inappropriate entries, along with unverified information are usually straightened out over time by other people. Dalby states: "Disproportionate emphasis on popular culture does happen, but that over time substance is added and entries are extended." Basically, as more people began to use the site, the site corrects itself. This concept is a bit like the law of large numbers; if you take a small sample of the population you are unlikely to see a normal curve, but the closer the sample size gets to the population the more the curve looks normal.
While there has been a astronomical rise in articles, Wikipedia has seen a fall in contributors too. This can be blamed on the fact that the website is much more structured now, with rules governing what can or can't be edited. Dalby outside of his book states, "It’s definitely a worrying trend...One question is, is there any new stuff to do on the site? When Wikipedia reaches 3 million articles, how many new articles can there be?" He believes that the main reason wikipedia grew was because of the lack of rules it had in its infant stages. But as its popularity grew, so does its publicity, so that when an article incorrectly claimed that Senator Edward Kennedy had died, the administrators of the website had no choice but to buckle down on editing rules. To Neil Postman, the author of Technopoly, this would be a prime example of how technology can harm us. But once again, I stick to the belief that it is not technology, but technology in the hands of the wrong people (ie. pranksters) that can mislead its users. Wikipedia works on the principle that people want accurate and timely information; of course a few bad apples can fall in there, but one cannot deny that it is a valuable resource.