Page 1
Intoduction to Wikipedia
Vandalism And The Colbert Effect
Page 2
Trusted Users Concept
Wikipedia trusted user levels
Page 3
Technocracy not Democracy
The Wikipedia Test
Wikipedia has Sources
Sources
Intoduction to Wikipedia
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone with Internet access. Wikipedia is based on previous research, not first hand research.
Wikipedia is designed so that users can make changes without worrying about damaging a page, as the page is backed up(you can view what the page looked like years ago in the history). Other users can spot errors and fix them.
Wikipedia is an ongoing work that anyone can contribute to. Young articles generally contain mistakes and significant misinformation. As the article age, there information becomes more reliable as it is viewed by more people. Wikipedia articles 'age' much faster than traditional encyclopedias, which are fixed in months or years.
Vandalism And The Colbert Effect
Steven Colbert introduced a conceived an idea called truthiness. Truthiness is quoted as 'those who think with their head and those who know with their heart '.
Steven Colbert then said that reality can be created if you write something and enough people agree with you. This is known as Wikiality. This is sort of funny but many people take his comments too seriously and actually think that there can be any information, from anything, with any view.
What Steven Colbert was accomplishing is known as vandalism. Any user can create vandalism but Wikipedia bots are getting better at spotting vandalism and reporting it to a trusted user. Even if Wikipedia bots do not flag an article as spam there is generally a trusted user with control over the articles.(this is explained in more detail in Trusted User Levels) However vandalism is a tough problem as wikipedia wants to make it easy for users to contribute, without having to register(many new users do not want to fill out another form)
Page 1
Intoduction to Wikipedia
Vandalism And The Colbert Effect
Page 2
Trusted Users Concept
Wikipedia trusted user levels
Page 3
Technocracy not Democracy
The Wikipedia Test
Wikipedia has Sources
Sources
