Data is raw. It simply exists and has no significance beyond its existence (in and of itself) .” (Bellinger, Castro, & Mills, 2004). A collection of data will emerge to be information, which will next be derived to knowledge and finally, wisdom. Can we imagine, how powerful is a company if they have a large database which is up to date and more importantly, accurate and reliable?
Most Web2.0 applications gather data from its users. Based on the results and analysis of the Web 2.0 services survey undertaken by the SPIRE project, Wikipedia is the most popular online services with usage ranging between 70 and 84 percent across all age groups. Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. The nature of Wikipedia is a collaborative, web based encyclopedia which is contributed by people. When it was first created, it was just two sentences. There are few groups of people who contribute to Wikipedia. The works include typo fixing, update links, formatting and efforts to make it nice and presentable (Swartz,2006).
The other Web2.0 application which serves similar purpose with Wikipedia is Nupedia. However, the content of Nupedia was contributed by expert users and has to go multi-step peer review process. For this reason, the process was slow. Wikipedia in contrast has generated a rate of 1,500 articles per month and has expanded into multilingual sites (Zittrain & Stark, 2010).
Despite having huge contents, there have been criticisms about Wikipedia for its unreliable reference work. “The term “wiki” describes Web sites that can be accessed and changed using a browser-based user interface” (Zittrain & Stark, 2010). For this reason, the information contained in the encyclopedia was arguably as not accurate. Even its co-founder, Jimmy Wales has acknowledged there are quality problems with Wikipedia.
In conclusion, the future of Wikipedia depends on the contribution of lay users. Therefore, there should be an effort to improve the quality of its content. One of the possible initiatives is to create alliances with other institutions to check the contents in order to have quality and reliable database.
References
Bellinger, G., Castro, D., & Mills, A. (2004). Data, Information, Knowledge and Wisdom. Retrieved March 2010, from Systems Thinking: http://www.systems-thinking.org/dikw/dikw.htm
Swartz, A. (2006, September 4). Who Writes Wikipedia. Retrieved March 2010, from Raw Thought: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia
Zittrain, J., & Stark, E. (2010, February 4). Future of Wikipedia. Retrieved March 2010, from Difficult Problem in Cyberlaw: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/cyberlaw_winter10/Future_of_Wikipedia
