Know it All

Know it All

In the article “Know it All,” by Stacy Schiff, she talks about her views on Wikipedia and she questions the reliability and trustworthiness of the site. At first she talks about the articles that Wikipedia holds versus a normal encyclopedia. Fair enough you can find ridiculous pages on curing hiccups to building a stove from a soda can but there is also articles relating to world history and more important things. From there she continues to talk about how Wikipedia was made and got started. At first Wikipedia was a site that anyone could go on to and edit the information. This started wars and people would enter in ridiculous information. Once administrators came into place a lot of the false reports were stopped by the rules and regulations.

She started to talk about the truth in the site and that’s when you could see the questions of her argument, is Wikipedia a reliable site? She talked a lot about the comparison the Britannica and found that it was for every 3 errors on Britannica there were 4 on Wikipedia. This shows that Wikipedia is not far off of Britannica. However Britannica is written more for educational purposes and includes more information on history and logic. For instance on the site of Wikipedia, “The (generally good) entry on St. Augustine is shorter than the one on Britney Spears” (Schiff). But it makes sense, because if Wikipedia is a site where anyone can edit, people have more to say on Britney Spears. I think with what she is saying you can assume that knowledge and activity is more successful and reliable than something that you read of the Internet. By going out and learning it first hand on by doing it yourself it will be a lot more trustworthy than something you can read off the internet. There are so many sites out there that are not reliable and have false information on them. Wikipedia is just one of them and is highly known for that because of it popularity and the pure fact that a lot of it is written by an everyday person for an everyday person.