User:TauntingElf/English 200 Paper

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[edit] Wikipedia Who?

Wikipedia Wikipedia and see what you find. Wikipedia is easily the most unique source of information ever to come into being. It is a living thing with people changing, improving, and adding information every second of ever day. Not only is Wikipedia in English, but also in 253 other languages. With over 75,000 active contributors, it is one of the most active websites on the Internet[1]. Wikipedia, even though the slogan “Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia” might say that it is an encyclopedia, it truly is a different beast(citation needed). It is by design not an “expertly reviewed” encyclopedia. It is reviewed by experts in their fields daily. The anonymous (or not so anonymous anymore) user is the greatest contributor to article content and accuracy(citation needed). Many of the vulnerabilities of such an open project have been addressed and some quite well removed from Wikipedia. Vandalism, the inclusion of either erroneous or otherwise wrong information in a page has always been a concern. This has been much less the case since the introduction of “bots”, or programs that constantly check the list of recent edits to Wikipedia[2]. Vandalism is now reverted within seconds of its addition and has ceased to be a problem. Concerns over people editing articles about themselves for their own ends has recently been seriously exposed. This is mainly due to the introduction of a utility called WikiScanner, developed by Virgil Griffith. Griffith is a renowned “hacker” who's background in such fields, including his graduate work at CalTech in artificial intelligence give him a position of credibility in the realm of technology(citation needed)(further reading). The WikiScanner utility takes editors IP addresses, or anonymous Internet signatures, and matches them with a database of known addresses(citation needed). The utility has proven that there have been malicious edits by people associated with the House of Representatives as well as news organizations. This has led to a serious look at the anonymous editors of Wikipedia and is making editing for personal ends less common. The preceding two criticisms are easily the most prevalent next to inaccurate or incomplete information. These criticisms are easily resolved by saying the project is working on itself. Things are added and made accurate every minute, an article that is two sentences long and tagged as a stub has turned into a multi-page article with sub-articles.