theOlster.net

Over the last year or so my internet browsing habits have changed considerably, mostly because of Wikipedia. Before this change started to take place, my starting point when approaching the world wide web was to visit the Google homepage. Google, probably the most used and effective search engine in the world provides listings for virtually every web site on the planet - but she has her dark side too.

I started to become a little dissatisfied with the results that Google was producing. They are now so riddled with adverts and that distraction feels a little force-fed. The results were also becoming more inaccurate, for example the top twenty highest ranked pages for any given search appear to be attributed to the sites who make the most effort to engage in ‘Black Hat Search Engine Optimization’ rather than the sites which most deserve to be ranked based on the search engine’s criteria. That is not to say that because I think these techniques are wrong, that they are not inevitable. The internet is as much about marketing as it is an information resource.

Which leads me on to Wikipedia - the free encyclopedia. Or for me not really an encyclopedia as much as just an information resource. After discussing Wikipedia with a friend of mine studying Medicine, he admitted using the website as the first port of call for the answer to a quick question - whether this related to his course or not. We discussed the pros and cons of the website as a resource, as well as the influence of vandals within the community. Our pros ran along the lines of constant praise based on how great is was to have a one-stop source of concise information dealing with topics as diverse as quantum computing and Richard ‘the hamster’ Hammond’s dragster crash. Our cons basically went along the lines of how little work we can get done once we start clicking on the links from one article to another.

Which leads on to vandalism or rather the mis-documentation of it. I’ve been getting a little frustrated with the number of news reports documenting vandalism on Wikipedia, and not because the vandalism is happening, but because they consider it to be notable news. The traditional encyclopedias may be keen to market the inaccuracies within Wikipedia, but the news websites really seem to have jumped on the bandwagon. I use Wikipedia every day for about a year, and to my knowledge I have updated a dozen Wikipedia entries at the most. These have been mostly because of slightly out-of-date articles or bad grammar or text. Most of the vandalism within Wikipedia has passed me by because these instances get corrected so quickly I don’t notice them.

What the news sites fail to acknowledge is the concept of a community based project, where errors are corrected by the community. With a website like Wikipedia anyone can edit it and everyone who uses it should! If a user finds inaccuracies they should be corrected by the user since there seem to be more genuine users than vandals. What we are actually seeing is visitors finding inaccuracies and publishing them rather than correcting them - thus missing the point. Their hype is a fallacy!
So, if I need to find out about a new piece of software and don’t want to read the commercial hype, my first stop is my friendly free online encyclopedia. I say ‘my’ because it belongs to me, and everyone else who uses and contributes - not the news websites who constantly miss the point. However, as I have seen with google, not every big thing stays big for ever - so I will keep my judgement eye wide open - I just can’t see any problems yet.