Argumentative Essay On Wikipedia

Adam T. Miller

Dr. Baker

English 10

31 January 2023

For years English and History teachers everywhere have told their students that Wikipedia is not a reliable source, but are they right about that? Brett Potash recites a common mantra that encapsulates the credibility of Wikipedia, "It only works in practice. In theory, it can never work". When one thinks about the concept of a website anyone can edit, the immediate assumption is that chaos will ensue, vandals will put blatantly false information on articles about important topics and accounts of historical events will be rife with opinions and bias. However, none of those things are actually happening, editors and administrators keep vandals in check and the number of contributors essentially

Nostalgically, Nicholas Baker looked back on the early days of the site and compared that, “It was like a giant community leaf-raking project... Some brought very fancy professional metal rakes or even back-mounted leaf-blowing systems, and some were just kids thrashing away with the sides of their feet or stuffing handfuls in the pockets of their sweatshirts, but all the leaves they brought to the pile were appreciated” (Baker). Although some people are more knowledgeable, more efficient, or effective at getting their points across, everyone makes mistakes, but with Wikipedia, those mistakes can be corrected very easily even by someone who isn’t as knowledgeable. These all come together to make something truly remarkable out of only tiny individual contributions. History and English teacher Brett Potash explains, “‘[a]nts aren't smart. Ants colonies are’ (Miller). Colonies regularly process such complicated procedures as finding the shortest route to food, dividing labor, and defending themselves from neighbors”(Potash). The amount that each individual ant adds to the ant hill may be minuscule but together they create something marvelous. Scholarly articles written by professors and scholars are reviewed by editors and that makes them more reliable. Wikipedia has that peer review process built in which creates a much better article.

However, this is simply not the case because the site itself has a protection policy that prohibits editing on particular articles, as well as the amount of worthy editors dedicated to conserving the quality of articles. Wikipedia can decide to protect an article so only a select few can edit it. Wikipedia prides themself on the fact that anyone can edit their articles but they stated that, “brief periods of an appropriate and reasonable protection level are allowed in situations where blatant vandalism, disruption, or abuse is occurring by multiple users and at a level of frequency that requires its use in order to stop it” (Wikipedia). Wikipedia protection comes at varying levels of restrictions and that can be selected by users that have administrator status. Administrators are individuals who are selected by the community and they have the ability to set protection status and to edit fully protected articles. There are many levels of protection that restrict certain actions such as editing, moving, or recreating deleted articles but the major types are semi-protection and full protection. Semi-protected articles cannot be manipulated by unregistered users and users with unconfirmed accounts. Fully protected articles can only be edited by administrators. While these measures are not intended to be overly