WIKI

Click Here for Wiki Article

In this article, Wikipedia and it's value to society as a reliable news source is being questioned. Most people feel that because anyone has the ability to go onto Wiki and add, remove, or edit previous "postings" on a given topic, that immediately drops the accuracy of the provided facts on the website. But when you look at some of the major events in our past few years as a nation and world, you can see just how accurately portrayed they are on Wikipedia. Most facts that are placed onto Wiki come from real news sources, but with Wiki, the speed of the updates are so immediate that it acts as a very important news tool to the world by providing instant alerts and access to important details on major world changing events. This particular article goes into detail about how successful Wikipedia was as a news source during the VT Shootings, and how it had so many "hits" that the website could hardly handle the amount of traffic that it was generating. Most of the information on the website was found to be accurate and when it was found false, there was more often then not a removal or flagging of such info.

I feel that Wikipedia is not far from becoming a widely used and widely recognized news source for all types of topics and information. They simply need to add more administrators and moderators that are willing to sift through the information, good and bad, and make each article's info as reliable and accurate as possible. I myself go to Wikipedia when i'm looking for a simple reference to a topic I just want a little bit of information on. But if Wikipedia took the time and effort to develop thier website to the point where they are recognized as an authentic source of news, then many more users would look first to Wiki instead of another site.