[FONT="]Darren O’Leary[/FONT]
[FONT="]11/13/2007[/FONT]
[FONT="]English 401[/FONT]
[FONT="]One aspect of the American culture is that, with advances in technology making virtually every part of our lives easier, people desire service faster, and more conveniently, than ever before. This can be seen in today’s world, with such examples as fast food, online banking, and drive-through ATM’s. Another way in which it can be seen is through the public’s usage of the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia.[/FONT]
[FONT="]The entire project began on March 9th, 2000, with the founding of Nupedia (a free online encyclopedia, written by experts, and formally reviewed). Nupedia was a free-content encyclopedia, at first using its own private open-content license, then switching to the GNU Free Documentation License.[/FONT]
[FONT="]Wikipedia was officially launched on January 15th, 2001, as a supplement to Nupedia (an encyclopedia edited by experts). Like Nupedia at the end of its days, Wikipedia also uses the GNU Free Documentation License, which means that its content is freely available for use by anybody.[/FONT]
[FONT="]The chief difference between Nupedia and Wikipedia, apart from their differences in success, is that Nupedia relied on people who were experts in a field to make contributions. This would require people to have their credentials revealed, their anonymity stripped away, and it greatly limited the number of contributors. In contrast, Wikipedia allows anybody to edit their articles, resulting in a far larger editor base than Nupedia, at a possible expense of quality. Indeed, there have been several incidences of vandalism within Wikipedia, where somebody would edit the information in the article so as to make it less accurate, for the purposes of sport, or spite. Nevertheless, this has not turned out to be the undoing of Wikipedia, but rather, its greatest strength. Nupedia had a total of 24 articles by the time it was taken down, whereas currently, Wikipedia has 2,090,766 articles in English alone, clearly showing its superiority (in terms of popularity) to Nupedia.[/FONT]
[FONT="]In August 2007, Virgil Giffith, a computer science graduate student, released WikiScanner, a program that traces who edits Wikipedia.[/FONT]
[FONT="]Other problems with Wikipedia, other than the ability of anybody to edit it, are its tendency to favor the consensus of its users over a minority who may have credentials. If a majority of users disagree with a large change made by one user with credentials, the change will be reversed, and their contribution ignored.[/FONT]
[FONT="] [/FONT]
[FONT="]The primary manner in which Wikipedia reflects upon the American culture is that it is a fast, convenient manner through which to obtain information. This motif is reflected throughout the entire culture, as[/FONT]
Yes, I know that it's shitty, and choppy, but eh.
[FONT="][/FONT]
[FONT="]11/13/2007[/FONT]
[FONT="]English 401[/FONT]
[FONT="]How Wikipedia Reflects Upon the American Culture[/FONT]
[FONT="]The entire project began on March 9th, 2000, with the founding of Nupedia (a free online encyclopedia, written by experts, and formally reviewed). Nupedia was a free-content encyclopedia, at first using its own private open-content license, then switching to the GNU Free Documentation License.[/FONT]
[FONT="]Wikipedia was officially launched on January 15th, 2001, as a supplement to Nupedia (an encyclopedia edited by experts). Like Nupedia at the end of its days, Wikipedia also uses the GNU Free Documentation License, which means that its content is freely available for use by anybody.[/FONT]
[FONT="]The chief difference between Nupedia and Wikipedia, apart from their differences in success, is that Nupedia relied on people who were experts in a field to make contributions. This would require people to have their credentials revealed, their anonymity stripped away, and it greatly limited the number of contributors. In contrast, Wikipedia allows anybody to edit their articles, resulting in a far larger editor base than Nupedia, at a possible expense of quality. Indeed, there have been several incidences of vandalism within Wikipedia, where somebody would edit the information in the article so as to make it less accurate, for the purposes of sport, or spite. Nevertheless, this has not turned out to be the undoing of Wikipedia, but rather, its greatest strength. Nupedia had a total of 24 articles by the time it was taken down, whereas currently, Wikipedia has 2,090,766 articles in English alone, clearly showing its superiority (in terms of popularity) to Nupedia.[/FONT]
[FONT="]In August 2007, Virgil Giffith, a computer science graduate student, released WikiScanner, a program that traces who edits Wikipedia.[/FONT]
[FONT="]Other problems with Wikipedia, other than the ability of anybody to edit it, are its tendency to favor the consensus of its users over a minority who may have credentials. If a majority of users disagree with a large change made by one user with credentials, the change will be reversed, and their contribution ignored.[/FONT]
[FONT="] [/FONT]
[FONT="]The primary manner in which Wikipedia reflects upon the American culture is that it is a fast, convenient manner through which to obtain information. This motif is reflected throughout the entire culture, as[/FONT]
Yes, I know that it's shitty, and choppy, but eh.
[FONT="][/FONT]
