Tuesday, April 15, 2008

BBC NEWS | Technology | Wikipedia takes business approach

A timely snapshot; see the full article for more details

Today Wikipedia is one of the world's largest reference websites attracting nearly 700 million visitors a year. It is written in more than 250 languages with over 2.3 million articles in its English edition.

With a degree of modesty Jimmy concedes "I thought if we are really successful we might make the top one hundred websites and now we are like number eight on the internet and much bigger than I would have ever thought."

On another note, via All Things Digital, a timely reality check from the Australian version of ComputerWorld:

If you are faced with the prospect of having brain surgery who would you rather it be performed by - a surgeon trained at medical school or someone who has read Wikipedia?

[...]

Professor Lichtenstein says the reliance by students on Wikipedia for finding information, and acceptance of the practice by teachers and academics, was "crowding out" valuable knowledge and creating a generation unable to source "credible expert" views even if desired.

"People are unwittingly trusting the information they find on Wikipedia, yet experience has shown it can be wrong, incomplete, biased, or misleading," she said. "Parents and teachers think it is [okay], but it is a light-weight model of knowledge and people don't know about the underlying model of how it operates."

BBC NEWS | Technology | Wikipedia takes business approach

No comments: