Prompt: Blog
entry writing prompt: Assess the benefits and
drawbacks of Wikipedia. Does the crowd sourcing truly prevent misinformation?
If so, how?
Wikipedia is a great tool. I use it often usually to satisfy a random question or trivial curiosity. I also use if as a starting point for more serious research. Wikipedia is a great resource for vetting topics for research. By looking up the questioned topic on Wikipedia you can easily see if it is written about often. Even though the actual information can not be used in serious scholarly documents it help to know that other people are interested in the same topic.
Unfortunately I don't think crowd sourcing prevents misinformation. The information is most likely not provide by subject matter experts and even if it is the articles do not receive the same kind of scrutiny that a scholarly journal would. This could potentially cause the information to be bias either by someone with motive or by ignorance of more complete research. I think this is why Wikipedia serves best as a starting place.
Strong opinion. 20 points.
ReplyDelete