This week’s topic brought up many discussions on our blogs about different reasons why we think Wikipedia is reliable or not. My blog post mentions how I used to think that Wikipedia had a lot of false information and that people would often change the articles and topics to fool around and make the information wrong. Many of the comments in my group seemed to agree with me about feeling this way before reading the articles. This could be because of professors and teachers telling us that Wikipedia is not a reliable source, and is not a valid reference for in a paper. However, after reading the articles for this week it seems to give off the impression that Wikipedia isn’t as bad as what we are all taught in school. Nearly every comment under my blog post mentions this, and talks about how it should be okay to use Wikipedia for school projects because it is constantly updated, and it allows the information to be from different perspectives. The idea of information on Wikipedia perhaps being biased was also brought up in my blog, and in the comments there were some responses to this. Others agreed that it may be bias because only those who are interested or have strong feelings against a certain topic would edit and contribute to the article. This bias may give a bias perspective to those who are reading the article to gain new knowledge. However, even encyclopedia’s can have a bias attached to it through the editor of edition and those who give the information. I feel as if there is always a way to create a bias, but Wikipedia eliminates much of any bias as well because of the fact that anyone can contribute.
I thought it was humorous that every single person commented on the picture I chose. It is about someone going on Wikipedia to read about one topic, but ends up reading about something completely different. Everyone commented saying that this concept is constantly happening to them as well, and I don’t think this is a bad thing. If Wikipedia can allow people to change topics they want to learn about that quickly, it is giving more knowledge to us than opening a book and reading on only the topic we were focused on. I think it is good that we get caught up on Wikipedia because there is nothing wrong with gaining new knowledge and learning about something new.
Overall, the comments under my blog this week were mostly agreeing with what I had to say, which allows me to believe that after reading the articles everyone had the same thoughts on Wikipedia. It is a good source of information, and I think that it should eventually be allowed to use as a scholarly source in an educational paper. Just like I read in one of the comments, if professors read the same articles we read this week, I think their opinions on Wikipedia would change and it would be a valid source.