Sunday, April 8, 2007

I love Wikipedia!!!

I love Wikipedia and I am not afraid of telling it! That is because I am a kind of person who shows gratitude to people who help. Wikipedia has saved me numerous times when I was doing my research and I couldn't find anything anywhere else, Wikipedia was there to give me some hints to make a better research. There are a lot of articles in Wikipedia that you will never find on any other website (apart from Encarta which copies from Wikipedia). That's just because Wikipedia is a place where all kinds of information is gathered and made accessible for free to anyone on this planet with internet! I love Wikipedia because it has saved my time when I was meant to do research on a topic I had no idea what it meant and Wikipedia provided me with a sweet summary that I'm sure without Wiki, I would have spent at least 3 hours trying to get all that information. One of the things that make me love Wikipedia is the fact that it is written by anybody so in other words it portrays the view point of us -- not just one elite.
Sadly, Wikipedia has been misunderstood by many because of they believe that it contains inaccurate information. Well, how do you define what is accurate or not? When Galileo said that the world wasn't flat, he was executed for wanting to spread inaccurate information but wasn't he right? Also, where is the freedom of speech! I don't want to say that all information on Wikipedia is accurate but even if there is (inaccuracy), it just shows the weak points of our society and it brings the issues forth so that we can face them, instead of ignoring them by having just one educated person controlling the information and making us think that everybody is like that. I think Wikipedia is just an alarm to how badly education needs to be improved.
I would like to clarify an important point too: Do not use just Wikipedia as your source for essays and other professional/academic stuff. It is good to take a look at Wikipedia at the beginning of the research to have an idea of what you need to know and get some keywords from the articles but Wiki is not strong enough to be an independent source. You need to find other sources that provide information in more details and that are more reliable.
In a few words: I don't know how my life would be without Wikipedia! (aaawww)

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