Wikipedia.com is a website that I go to whenever I need knowledge on just about anything. Then name itself is a combination of a wiki, and an encyclopedia. A wiki is an internet-based collaboration of information which can be modified by its users. The combination of the wiki and encyclopedia has made wikipedia.com vastly popular, but also extremely convenient.
The internet provides wikipedia.com with many advantages over regular encyclopedias. The first advantage is its enormous amount of information. Where encyclopedia volumes normally cover a single subject (such as World War II), wikipedia.com covers all subjects that its millions of users have shared (which is nearly every subject covered by any encyclopedia). Its second advantage of wikipedia.com being on the internet is its hyperlinks. Hyperlinks are parts of text that allow users to access another internet article based on the text they clicked. Hyperlinks are a much more efficient and quicker way to find information that it would be to look up the word and find the page number in a regular encyclopedia. Furthermore, you can find a much more extensive amount of information from wikipedia.com than most encyclopedias.
To transfer the information of wikipedia.com into printed text would be impossible. Where an encyclopedia contains very detailed information about one subject, wikipedia.com contains very detailed information about nearly every subject. Wikipedia.com currently contains a little less than two million articles. Assuming each article averages two pages (which is a safe under-estimation), a printed version of wikipedia.com would be four million pages. It would not be physically possible to create this, nor would it be convenient to locate any articles.
Wikipedia.com is a great source of information and does what printed information cannot. It significantly reduces research time, while also providing more details about related subjects. Although it has these many advantages, it has one weakness which is credibility. Because it is a wiki, anyone is allowed to alter any articles content. By allowing anyone to edit it, the truth can be changed into false information. However, Wikipedia.com does have guidelines that must be followed in order to make changes, and quickly finds and corrects vandalized articles. Wikipedia.com is the ultimate encyclopedia.
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2 comments:
i agree....wikipedia is one of my first choices to check on any info i need....addicting, almost.....nicely written response about it
Well said! I agree with Kevin that it can become quite addicting with the clicking of key words and practically endless information. If I only had the time...
There is really nothing to compare in printed work to the vast world of knowledge you can find within wikipedia. As you read it allows to you dive further and further into any subject of your choice, which is virtually impossible to do with any ordinary encyclopedia set.
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