I did my midterm project (http://wikipedia-structure.pbwiki.com/) on the structure of Wikipedia. I did not want to include this essay in my project, but I want to post it anyway for my blog post; it captures a lot of my thinking on the subject. Wikipedia was the first website named on Time Magizene’s article on the Web 2.0, I think Wikipedia embodies a lot of what is new and changing about media, such popularity, accessibility, and creation by users.
To me at least, the outstanding aspects of Wikipedia are that it is surprisingly accurate, very up to date, and extraordinarily large. These features have allowed the website to reach its unprecedented size and popularity. And these features come from its organizational structure.
The website is simple because users can access, create and change almost anything. There are almost no limits or rules. Everything that is in the encyclopedia is presented when anyone views a page. The page is not customized for the viewer based on their preferences. Furthermore, a user can edit almost any article. It seems almost miraculous, and it certainly was unexpected, that anonymous volunteers could create a structure so vast and accurate.
This accuracy has been called into question, yet by some measures shown to be analogous to other encyclopedias. For example, Wikipedia has been condemned for including an article linking journalist John Seigenthaler to the assignations of Robert Kennedy and John F Kennedy. Obviously no student trusting the accuracy of what they read in the website should read a theory with such little credibility. However, to test the accuracy of Wikipedia, Nature magazine tested Wikipedia against the standard of the Encyclopedia Britannica and concluded that the two databases were comparably accurate. Nature chose articles on many subjects from Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica and sent them to experts in those fields for review. The experts were to compare the two articles but were not told which encyclopedia they were from. These experts found equal numbers of serious errors in each, and comparable rates of errors, an average of 2.92 mistakes per article for Britannica and 3.86 for Wikipedia (http://www.nature.com/doifinder/10.1038/438900a ). Wikipedia’s accuracy comes from it’s self-policing nature: anyone can vandalize and article, but anyone else can clean it up. Thus surprisingly high standards have been reached.
Whereas Wikipedia’s accuracy could be a potential fault, the website’s size and up-to-date content are definite pluses. Articles are added and updated as soon as they are relevant. For example, I missed the Oscars this year, so the next day I went to Wikipedia to find who the winners were. Less than twenty-four hours after the awards ceremony, that website contained all of them. Wikipedia’s breadth is similarly astounding. If one looks in the Pomona in the Encyclopedia Brittanica, they can only find the college mentioned in an article about the Claremont Colleges (http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9002328/Claremont-Colleges). But in Wikipedia one finds an in-depth 15 page article on the college, with pictures, links to famous graduates, and interesting facts such as our love of the number 47.
This astounding range and contemporariness of Wikipedia are of course bound to the fact that anyone can edit the popular text. Whereas only some authors can edit the Encyclopedia Britannica, any Pomona graduate can contribute to its Wikipedia page. Furthermore this size and popularity play off each other. If the encyclopedia wasn’t so popular, there wouldn’t be enough anonymous authors to make it so extensive. Yet if it wasn’t so big, it wouldn’t be as popular. Thus its simple structure contributed to both aspects, as well as its accuracy. It is almost ingenious, although