The website, Wikipedia is the kind of thing the Internet was made for. It is basicaly a free encyclopedia, which is maintained by people creating entries for various subjects. The most prominent word there is 'free'. As anyone who might have wanted to research a topic on an online encyclopedia recently will have found, all the established names (Britannica, Encarta - once a mainstay in the 'research' (read; cut and paste) of any 2nd year's essays) have an extortionate fee to charge anyone who might want to use the service once .
However, while the people who genuinely maintain the site are to be congratulated, there are too many dickheads out there who try to ruin it. Some arsehole wanted to win a bet, so he changed the details of an entry to accuse somebody of the Assassination of John F Kennedy. And there are worse dicks, people who do it for no other reason than they have no lives beyond the 12-foot radius of their computer screen. This practice ruins Wikipedia's reputation as a source of information, and therefore forces students or academics to pay for good-but-not-worth-the-fee encrypted encyclopedias.
Wednesday, January 11, 2006
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
1 comment:
I find it to be a very cynical view you express there, Kippiter, "a minority want to learn." If that were the case, the site would never have got off the ground in the first place.
Post a Comment