Wikipedia has always been given a bad reputation by every professor I have ever had. I love that you encourage us to use Wikipedia because I have always thought it was a good source. Wikipedia is the epidemy of crowdsourcing! It’s putting everyone’s brains together and creating excellent information about almost anything you could think of. The whole concept of this source is that people are only going to add information to the pages that they have knowledge and passion for. This eliminates people from the putting random information into pages just because they can. However, when this does happen then there is someone who is reviewing all the edits that are made to every page to make sure that it is relevant.
The concept of Wikipedia is the same as the Free Software movement by Richard Stallman. There were 4 freedoms of the software:
- The freedom to run the software for any purpose
- The freedom to redistribute copies
- The freedom to study how the software works and make changes to improve the software
- The freedom to improve the software and release the improvements to the public
This brings back up the concept of public domain and making everything available to everyone. This is a great idea in theory, but as mentioned in another post, our society today is all about capital gain and getting the reward for our work. So, in today’s world, we are more about silo-ing data and only allowing it to be distributed if someone pays for it.