Wiki's, what a great creation. In Daniel H. Pink's article, "The Book Stops Here", he discussed the way Wikipedia came about and how addicting it can be.
Jimmy Wales creation has gone from Nupedia, a "One Best Way" model,(uses experts to write articles on specific subject areas) and 12 articles in 18 months, to the now a million plus articles of Wikipedia.
We have talked about Wiki's before, but this article takes it to the encyclopedia area. It talks about how Wikipedia is comparable to Britannica and Encarta. Both of these encyclopedia's are well known and formally known as the books to find info on everything. But Pink shows that, in 2005, Wikipedia had 500,000 articles while Britannica had 80,000 and Encarta had 4,500. Now to me, I see Wikipedia as a better resource for locating info.
We had the discussion in class about the accuracy of Wikipedia articles and other encyclopedias, and it turned out that they share about the same accuracy. To think, something made by regular people is just as accurate as something put together solely by "experts" of the field. hmm, Never underestimate the regular man.
I think that Wikipedia should be allowed to be legitimate resources for papers and such since it is comparably accurate to those of bound encyclopedias. PLUS its up to date with current information that book bound encyclopedias cant do.
Looks as if the world of Web 2.0 is sprouting and we need to get Universities into the mix of it before we are the only ones using books to do research :-P
