The good, the bad… and Wikipedia

Summary Introduction, a few words about the texts and the theme: 1 I. From a utopian project to a competitive tool: 1 II. To trust or not to trust? It is your own question: 2 III. Why Wikipedia still remains a phenomenon despite its drawbacks: 2 Conclusion, Me and Wikipedia 3

Introduction, a few words about the texts and the theme:

The three texts, that I have chosen, have a same subject: the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. However, they were taken from different sources (the Daily Telegraph, the Observer and Wikipedia itself) and they were written at different times: two of them are rather recent and the third one does not have any date. So, they may have different points of view on this virtual tool which is becoming a real social phenomenon.

From a utopian project to a competitive tool:

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia which has two important particularities: it is written and upgraded only by users without any kind of external control and this encyclopedia is completely free of change. On the whole, Wikipedia is by and for Internet surfers. At present, the English Wikipedia version counts more than two million articles and is in perpetual growth. Moreover, if its reliability is often questioned, its seriousness is undeniable. Facing this new kind of knowledge, dilemmas were bound to be raised. Can we consider Wikipedia as a real encyclopedia? Is an open-source encyclopedia reliable? How can we trust an anonymous article? These are questions asked by other editors of paying encyclopedias like the Encyclopedia Britannica but also by journalists and users. Since its creation, on all these points, answers have been so different and these three articles give some interesting examples of the different points of view. In these three cases, the writers understood that an answer to Wikipedia’s capacities will have repercussions on knowledge evolution facing the