Know it All

The article “Know it All” by Stacey Schiff was an integuing piece about the development of the website Wikipedia. It talks about the foundation of the website, which was established in 2001 by Jimmy Whales and was originally founded as the Wiki. The idea behind the website was to reestablish the encyclopedia, but be able to make it more inclusive and consistently current. To have it where anyone can access and update information. It would be a democratic sort of encyclopedia. Also to have a broader range of information that you can derive from the website, then you could an encyclopedia. It discussed how when it first started they weren’t able to produce many article because it takes so long to tract down information, check for accuracy, and then publish the current status of it. It then talked about how they began using this new program called Nupedia, which then made them able to produce thousands of articles in a year. This changed the website from Wiki to Wikipedia. Now we currently have over a million articles on the website. The only problem with this remarkable site is the legitimacy of the content of the website. The idea that anyone with information can put it on the site is not necessarily reliable. People could put inaccurate, bias information and its up on the website, like its fact when it’s not. This is where people need to realize that just because the internet has the idea of authority of recourse of information, doesn’t mean that it actually is knowledgeable. Just like how not all books are knowledgeable, a lot of times there people ideas or opinions. It gives the idea that in order to have real authority of information, which has to be knowledgeable of the information. You also need to realize that when you’re reading something whether or not it actually has authority or not.