Wikipedia
I have no doubt that my degree would have been harder to get had I not had Wikipedia to hand. There is in fact a Facebook group called “All my medical knowledge came from Wikipedia”, which states;
Every ounce of medical knowledge we have was obtained from Dr. Wikipedia. She’s quick, intelligent, always available to answer our questions, and best of all…. she NEVER pimps us.
It is the greatest tool in the fight against essays; University students worldwide know the truth in that. I have used Wikipedia for many years, and have written a few articles for the site, and edited many more. My articles:
MacHeist was an online Macintosh community event which ran at the end of 2006 and raised $200,000 for charity. A series of puzzles were set, with cryptic clues scattered across the web to find and decipher. Once completed, the player would receive Mac shareware applications as a reward.
I wrote the article, mostly because no one else had. I was rather pleased with the result proud of my contribution to Wikipedia. My good mood didn't last. Very quickly I received nasty messages from from the internet anonymous, the article was nominated for deletion twice, and suffered an assortment of vandalism including:
Originally an invite-only event, it later became open to the entire gay Mac community.
The online event was a series of homosexual puzzles in which visitors to the site were provided with cryptic clues to decipher or track down obscure websites to retrieve details to send back to MacHeist in exchange for butt sex. Once completed, the player would receive the Mac holy gaynigger seed deposited from Steve Jobs himself.
MacHeist was a six week long butt f-ing event which ran at the end of 2006 and raised $200,000.00 for charity.
What amazed me was the sheer speed at which the vandalism was corrected, and not by me. Checking the page history, it took less than five minutes from someone changing the Paris Hilton article from "Paris Hilton is now married to britney spears. they wed on the 1st of january" back to the original. Now, obviously not everything on Wikipedia is compleatly acurate. The site is open for anyone to edit, and if I wanted to say that Tony Blair was the love-child of Princess Leia and Sherlock Holmes I could, but I suspect it wouldn’t say on the site very long.
The prestigious science journal Nature conducted an investigation into the accuracy of Wikipedia vs the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Remarkably after looking at 42 articles;
Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia… But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively.
An open Encyclopaediam with authors from the great unwashed that’s a feather in the cap for Wikipedia and a rather damming verdict on Britannica’s copy-checkers. Ultimately you can’t trust Wikipedia as your only source of information, but as I discovered, the crap doesn’t hang around long.
Founder Jimmy Wales was interviewed by Simon Mayo on BBC Radio 5 Live about the future of Wikipedia, last Monday.
To clarify, my earlier comment about using Wikipedia for my degree was not an admission to plagiarism. I never copied from Wikipeida, it was a source of reference and research. Should make that clear, I don’t want my degree stripped from me as my mum is too proud of my Graduation photo.