Wikipedia Trust or Not?

According to Wikipedia (2008), wikipedia is written mutually by the volunteers from all around the world. Besides, it has grown rapidly into one of the largest reference website that attracting at least 684 million visitors yearly by year 2008 (Wikepedia 2008). Reep (2006) claims that viewers are attracted by valuable contain and well-presented information of the website.

Problems

Everyday hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world create or edit tens of thousands existing articles and new articles in order to enhance the knowledge held by the Wikipedia encyclopedia (Wikipedia 2008). Consequently, it means that people of all ages from different social, cultural, and education level “can” write or edit an article in Wikipedia encyclopedia. Thus Wikipedia’s reliability and accuracy are an major issue here.
Due to this reason, Wikipedia may include some newer articles that contain significant misinformation, wrong or harm content (Wikipedia 2008). This has resulted Wikipedia “make no guarantee of validity” of its content (Wikipedia 2008).

Wikipedia Vs Encyclopedia Britannica

(Source from Wikipedia)

Traditional encyclopedias such as Encyclopedia Britannica undergo formal peer-review process to the article whereas Wikipedia does not. Hence the source of valid information from Wikipedia has been criticised and have often compare to the Encyclopedia Britannica as an example of an accurate reference (CNET News 2005). Nielsen and Morkes (1997), states that information credibility is important on all websites, as audiences do not want to be "fed on false facts".

(Source from Google)

According to a study by Nature, wikipedia had 162 problems (series of factual errors, omissions or misleading statements) and Britannica had 123 problems. As they continue, that averages out to 2.92 mistakes per article for Britannica and 3.86 for Wikipedia. Thus as a compare, Britannica came out looking “a little bit” more accurate than Wikipedia.

CNET News (2005) states that “Wikipedia is about as good a source of accurate information as Britannica, the venerable standard-bearer of facts about the world around us”.
In my opinion, in order to tackle the problem of misinformation and credibility of Wikipedia, viewers should consider the accurate reference source from Wikipedia and get information from there. Besides, through citing from peer-reviewed article such as Harvard Business Review, viewers will get a better credibility of information.





Reference Lists:
CNET, 2005, News 'Study: Wikipedia As Accurate As Britannica', viewed on 12nd June 2008 at, <http://news.cnet.com/Study-Wikipedia-as-accurate-as-Britannica/2100-1038_3-5997332.html>



Morkes,J & Nielsen, J, 1997, “Concise, Scannable, and Objective: How to write for the web.”, Useit.com, viewed on 13rd June 2008 at, <http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/writing.html>

Reep, D, 2006, “Technical Writing”, 6th Edition, Pearson Education, New York.

Wikipedia, 2008, “About Wikipedia”, U.S., viewed on 12th June 2008 at,