Reading Responce #4

Kimberly Rhine
LIB 103
Ms. Pemberton
Ms. Cody

Reading #4

Read, Brock. “Can Wikipedia Ever Make The Grade” Chronicles of Higher Education. (10/27/2006).

It wasn’t until recently that I learned that Wikipedia wasn’t as great at is seemed. I always thought of Wikipedia to be awesome because it had information on almost anything I wanted, I never got bad grades on the assignments that I got information from on Wikipedia so I thought it was perfect. This article talks about how really Wikipedia can’t be fooling you. Anyone can use additions or put in false facts or even delete facts on Wikipedia sources. I always saw the edit button on Wikipedia but I was either so caught up in getting my information it never fazed me as to what “edit” actually really meant.
In this article they talk about how “mob-edited” publications can obviously be untrue and actually cause controversy. Apparently a professor’s name and a politician’s name were defaced and were impacted by the allegations until they were able to show that it was an edited site and was in fact false. It got to the point where there was so much drama and falsifications that Mr. Halavais decided to conduct an experiment to see which sites were normally edited. He was able to find out that sites that were “trolled” were forums, blogs, and Wikipedia (obviously). These types of websites were subject to a lot of false and disruptive statement. Despite my lucky of never receiving any bad grades, or had teachers correct me on my “inaccurate facts” in Mr. Halavais’s experiment showed that Wikipedia continues to provide students with mixed-often failing grades.