I wasn’t surprised on what I found out about Wikipedia after reading the articles on NPR and Wired. When Wikipedia first came out I didn’t know that it was not reliable and I got angry when my teachers told me it could not be used as a source for papers. Then my freshman year, my roommate and I were bored one day and we just started to put crazy things on Wikipedia to see how long they would last. They stayed on the website for about 2 hours. After then I realized that if I took two hours to get ridiculous information off the site then how long would it take to get information off of something that seemed kind of correct? It is going to take many years until the website of Wikipedia can be used as a good reliable source, but for now, it is very useful when you need to find out fast facts.
I was also not surprised when I found out about what companies like Wal-Mart are doing when it comes to information on their stores on Wikipedia. Since many people believe that Wikipedia is a reliable source, it was kind of intelligent for these companies to write these falsehoods knowing that it would take days until someone noticed the information if they did at all. Even though it is unethical what they did, at the same time it is just another way that the company can publicize themselves. Wikipedia really needs to be revamped so that not everyone can write on the website and we can have more reliable source. Wikipedia has a good base idea, there are just some things that need to be tweaked.
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