The World and Wikipedia: How We Are Editing Reality, Conclusion

I found the second half of Dalby’s book to be less interesting than the first, because it seemed an awful lot like the first half.

Wikipedia claims to be “fair” by maintaining 3 rules for posting: neutrality, verifiability, and no original research. Many contributors adhere to these rules, but many do not. Don't get me wrong--there is a great deal of reliable information to be found on Wikipedia, but there's also a lot of bias, regardless of the “neutrality” rule. Wikipedia also tries to encourage respect and congeniality among those who post however, the “good guys” are often overpowered by the “bad guys”, who are mean and petty people.

Wikipedia is great in that you can pretty much find out about something in real-time articles will be written by someone, somewhere, within hours (or sometimes minutes) of late-breaking news. Whenever you do an internet search, on Google, for example, did you notice the first result shown? Most of the time, it’s the Wikipedia entry on the topic. That’s a huge web presence, and it's definitely impressive.

The ultimate power on Wikipedia belongs to the administrators. They can block entries, as well as delete entries, with a simple click of their mouse. How does one become an administrator, you might wonder? Well, administrators are brought on as such by other administrators. It doesn’t matter how much how much a person has contributed, or what the quality of their contributions have been. If an administrator likes them, they’re “in," and they, too, can be an administrator. Kind of like a school-kid mentality, if you ask me.

One has to wonder why many articles still exist on Wikipedia even though they are one-sided and biased, lacking the neutrality that's supposed to be maintained by Wikipedia. We can thank the administrators for these articles. If the admins like it, regardless of the rules the rest of us must follow, it stays on the site. This reminds me of that school–kid mentality again. Rebellious--rules be damned!

I agree with Dalby when he sums it all up, saying, “No one can claim that Wikipedia, as a whole, is a “reliable source”…We need to judge each article for its reliability on its merits, and “take the crucial detail as unreliable, until we confirm it in an independent source.” This seems like good, sound, and, dare I say it--reliable--advice to me.