Wikipedia

a. What is Wikipedia?
 is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles (over 3.78 million in English) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,^[ and it has about 90,000 regularly active contributors. As of July 2011, there are editions of Wikipedia in 282 languages. It has become the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet,ranking sixth globally among all websites on Alexa and having an estimated 365 million readers worldwide. It is estimated that Wikipedia receives 2.7 billion monthly pageviews from the United States alone.Founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.

b. How would you answer the question posed in this piece “How reliable can a source be when anyone can edit it?”? 
When anyone can edit and save information on a web based site, the information is completly unreliable and nonfactual. The information can not be trusted to be true or factual because anyone can change it.  I think personally Wikipedia has a lot of informational facts, but a lot of it is not reliable. I do think that a good bit of it is factual and true.

c. Who do the creators of Wikipedia place their trust in when it comes to weeding out misinformation? 
Most wikis are set up so that it is very easy and quick to undo vandalism, so don't get too worried about any given incident.Build a community of good faith editors.The stronger a community a wiki has supporting it, and the more good content it maintains, the less of an impact a few bad edits will have on the overall quality. Good content and good community also serve to set a good example for beginning editors.


d. Why did founder Larry Sanger leave Wikipedia? 
Sanger left Wikipedia in 2002, and has since been critical of the project. He articulated that despite its merits, Wikipedia lacks credibility due to, among other things, a lack of respect for expertise. After leaving the project, Sanger taught philosophy at Ohio State University and was an early strategist for the expert-authored Encyclopedia of Earth. On September 15, 2006 he publicly announced Citizendium, first envisioned as a fork of Wikipedia.It was launched on March 25, 2007. Citizendium represents an effort to create a credible and free-access encyclopedia. Sanger had aimed to bring more accountability to the internet encyclopedia model.
e. What would abuse or vandalism look like on a Wikipedia page? 
Vandalism is any addition, removal, or change of content in a deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of Wikipedia. Examples of typical vandalism are adding irrelevant obscenities and crude humor to a page, illegitimately blanking pages, and inserting obvious nonsense into a page. Vandalism is prohibited.


f. What do the statistics quoted in the third paragraph of this piece reveal? 
Reveals that 18% of people that edit Wikipedia are in a small group.
g. Why do you think Wikipedia is so successful? 
Regardless of how you feel about the quality or accuracy of the content that’s being developed on Wikipedia, as a collaborative initiative using a social medium it has been very successful. Even despite some of its more recent setbacks, you can’t argue that it’s brought together a multitude of individuals with very diverse backgrounds and expertise and allowed for the creation of a product that has become, for many, a first stop on their journey to learn something new. (If that’s their only stop then they’re not doing in-depth research, but then the same could be said for any other information resource.)


h. Why might Wikipedia’s creators not want to accept advertising? 
A common response to the first is that those who don’t like ads can run an ad blocker. Easier still, those who don’t like ads can log in — there’s little reason to display ads to logged in users, who probably generate a tiny fraction of pageviews. But I don’t think either of these responses will satisfy this form of the objection, as it is basically emotional. I also believe that they would not want advertising because it would promote more people to go to the website and start editing the text. They are trying to prevent this.


i. How does Wikiscanner help increase the reliability of Wikipedia entries?
WikiScanner (also known as Wikipedia Scanner) was a tool which consisted of a publicly searchable database that linked millions of anonymous edits on the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia to the organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on the owners of the associated block of IP addresses.The tool's database contains 34,417,493 entries on anonymous edits (those by users who were not logged in to Wikipedia) between 7 February 2002 and 4 August 2007. Griffith stated that the database was constructed by compiling the anonymous edits included amongst the monthly public database dumps of Wikipedia. Griffith said he connects the organizations to the IP numbers with the assistance of the IP2Location, through which comparison he had found "187,529 different organizations with at least one anonymous Wikipedia edit.
At a rate of 600 words a minute, twenty-four hours a day, a person could read nearly 27,000,000 words in a month. In the month of July 2006, Wikipedia grew by over 30,000,000 words. Given this, it is unlikely for any single reader to read all of Wikipedia's new content. Reading the current incarnation at that rate would take over seven years, and by the time they were done, so much would have changed with the parts they had already read that they would have to start over. Therefore, the best way to get an idea of the bigger picture is with statistics.