Wikipedia Assignment

When the only option of access to an encyclopedia was having a printed version of it, access to information was somewhat difficult. Now not only we have access to encyclopedias via the Internet, but when Wikipedia was created it facilitated the access to real-time updated articles of different countries in English language and in other languages. Even though Encyclopedia Britannica is also available online and it has a good degree of credibility, there you can not find many of the articles that you find in Wikipedia, especially articles about local issues in different countries or recent matters. Differently from Britannica, Wikipedia is an open-source encyclopedia, meaning that any one that has access to Internet and a computer can create or change its articles, making it possible to access information from any where in the world.

Not only Wikipedia has the advantage of being open-source and therefore global, but a study has shown that “Wikipedia is about as good a source of accurate information as Britannica” according to News.com in the article “Study: Wikipedia as accurate as Britannica” by Daniel Terdiman. The reason why Wikipedia is considered accurate is because there is a working staff on Wikipedia that revise the articles that are recently published, and there are also collaborators who are dedicated to revising articles.

For this assignment, I have chosen to compare the entry “Blekinge Institute of Technology” in Wikipedia and in Encyclopedia Britannica. While in Wikipedia I found a short entry with general information about our university, it was not possible to find anything about it in EB. In Wikipedia anything can potentially become an article and, because of that, we are able to share information about any local subject to a global audience.