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The Failure Of Wikipedia's Credibility

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Wikipedia, as a resource, is undoubtedly useful. It contains many tertiary sources that are useful to users that are searching for general knowledge. One of Wikipedia's core goals is to gather information from users worldwide in order to create a platform for a collaborative creation of knowledge . This goal is theoretically achieved when all articles are of high and accurate quality. However useful Wikipedia is as an informational source, its existence as a platform of collaborative knowledge is hindered by Wikipedia's very own policies and regulations. It relies on users to contribute to, maintain, regulate, and police the content of the entire site. Furthermore, Wikipedia grants freedom to any user who visits to edit, add to, or remove the content of its …show more content…

As well, Wikipedia responds to vandalism on its articles by relying on its users to police the site, giving no other incentive to do so . Users are also responsible to verify the sources that other users reference. Lastly, Wikipedia's policies on editing articles result in users favouring quantity over quality, as the interface of Wikipedia's editing history pages gives an illusion that adding more information is positive, while removing information is detrimental. As a culmination of all these reasons, Wikipedia is failing at the goal of becoming a platform of collaborative knowledge because its very own processes hinder this goal. Wikipedia's primary fault is that it relies on users and bots to edit and maintain its articles. Fundamentally, the sheer size of Wikipedia makes it hard for all articles to be maintained. Wikipedia has approximately 4,000,000 articles, so hiring enough staff to scour through such a mountain of information to edit them is a physical impossibility.

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