3. Free knowledge for everyone.





Until the 21st century, people got most of the information from other people or text sources, for example encyclopedias. But everything has changed after invention of Wikipedia in 2001. Hard to imagine modern life without using Wikipedia, because it is most easy way to find information.

Originally, Wikipedia was created as supplement to the free Nupedia encyclopedia, written by experts as an additional source of draft articles and ideas. But Wikipedia quickly bypassed Nupedia, becoming a big international project. Today the English Wikipedia contains over 6,000,000 articles, it is also one of the most popular websites in the world.

The main advantage and at the same time biggest drawback of Wikipedia, is the fact that anyone can edit any article. Wikipedia can be free because of it, because you don't have to spend a lot of money to hire editors, who would check articles. Also thanks to the large number of editors, information about anything appears very quickly. But that means, that due to its nature, it is not a reliable source of the information. Therefore, in the scientific community, the use of Wikipedia as a primary source of information is unacceptable.

The fact that anyone can edit articles also means that if someone wants to "sabotage" the article, no one can stop him. In 2020, there are many moderators who check the edits in the articles, so information nowadays is more "safe". But even today Wikipedia is not protected from "vandalism" in highly specialized topics due to extremely small number of editor with knowledge about given articles. For this reason, Wikipedia still loses in the amount of information compare to specialized sites and forums.

Thanks to the hyperlink system, information is very easy and quick to get. This technology makes site navigation much faster and more convenient than you would have to return to the home page every time.
But hyperlink system also brings chaos. It can be very difficult to find the information you need. It can get lost among other topics, as the list of articles will simply be too long to scroll through.

In conclusion, we can say that the world has changed significantly since the appearance of Wikipedia. Any person who has access to the Internet can get enormous amount of information quickly and for free. Wikipedia is a great source of basic and relevant information around the world. It cannot replace the knowledge, that you can obtain from library, but it complements them perfectly.

Sources:

https://www.academia.edu/38695410/From_Diderot_s_Encyclopedia_to_Wales_s_Wikipedia_a_brief_history_of_collecting_and_sharing_knowledge

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