Keeping Wikipedia is a GOOD Choice

From Happy Group Discuss

A. Free Accessing
On the internet, the concept of "free for sharing" is very important that will burst the development of everything and bring positive competition.

Wikipedia provides free access to all of human knowledge, ultimately providing free knowledge to anyone on anything. No fees or hidden costs- just knowledge. Furthermore it provides a neutral point of view. Since the writers and editors of Wikipedia are everyday people just like you and me, they provide both sides of a story, while a for-profit encyclopedia company may edit or revise articles or sides of a story in order to keep shareholders happy.

As a collaborative encyclopedia, Wikipedia allows people from a variety of backgrounds to come together to share knowledge and information with the rest of the world. It starts a dialogue about a specific topic and encourages the rest of the world to part-take in this dialogue. As a multilingual encyclopedia, Wikipedia is not an exclusive encyclopedia; one does not need to know English to understand the text. Articles in Spanish, Dutch, French, Portuguese and Chinese are just the beginning of Wikipedia’s multilingual text.

B. Real-Time Content
Article writers have the ability to change and update articles that in anytime, anywhere, they don’t have to go through the book publishers. So, the Wikipedia can be served as an online newspaper. The article about Manila hostage crisis is created on 23 August, right after it happened.

Wikipedia?! Brittanica?!

Although Britannica is the oldest English-language general encyclopaedia, I still prefer keeping Wikipedia. Here are the reasons:

A.   Totally Free Accessing

Comparing with Britannica, Wikipedia is a free accessing website whereas Britannica is not totally free. Though some people may argue that Britannica could offer short versions of articles for free and it is worth charging US$69.95 a year for full entry [1], Britannica is still expensive for most people especially students. As a result, it would be cheaper for the users when the users want to search the same information in the Wikipedia.



 B.   Wider Categories of Content



As claimed in the official website of Britannica, it mainly focuses on the arts and sciences [2] which implied the variety of Britannica is narrower. For examples, I tried to search ‘Paris Whitney Hilton’ (an American celebrity) on both Britannica and Wikipedia so as to differentiate the difference. For the Britannica, the browser shows ‘the topic Paris Hilton is discussed at the following external Web sites.’ And the external website is the official website of Paris Hilton. [3] In other words, this search is a little bit useless. However, when I search ‘Paris Whitney Hilton’ in Wikipedia, there is a long article about her in details. [4] Moreover, Wikipedia not only includes the profile of Paris Hilton, but also the crimes she involved which are not included in her official website. All in all, Britannica may be good at arts and sciences subjects, but not other issues. A 2008 study conducted by researchers at Carnegie-Mellon University and Palo Alto Research Center gave a distribution of topics [5] and it clearly shows the wide ranges of topics are found. Besides, there are total 272 kinds of languages in Wikipedia whereas only English is available in Britannica. [6][7] The obstacles of languages are then reduced for Wikipedia. Therefore, keeping Wikipedia would be an advantage for this circumstance because much information and topics will be found. 



Result of Pris Hilton in Wiki





Result of Paris Hilton in Britannica

 



 

C.   Less Bias

Wikipedia is an open editing website, almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site so the bias of the contents will be minimized. Since the opinions of large spectrum of people can be included, the objective opinions of certain controversial issues can be maintained. However, Britannica is not. It cannot be edited by anyone, users CAN ONLY GIVE SUGGESTIONS to the editorial team which means only the editorial team has the right to select and change the contents. Some less desirable contents may thus be omitted or neglected. Therefore, the coverage of the opinions in Britannica is not as wide as Wikipedia.

D.  Accuracy

The accuracy of the contents of Wikipedia is always criticized by most scholars. Moreover, a lot of schools do not encourage their students to include the contents from Wikipedia because the authors or editors are not professionals and have unknown academic background. However, according to the journal Nature cited in BBC news, it suggested that for scientific articles, Wikipedia came close to the level of accuracy of Encyclopaedia Britannica and had a similar rate of "serious errors.[8]

E.   Up-to-date Content

Last but not least is the up-to-date content of Wikipedia. Take Manila hostage crisis happened on the 23^rd August 2010 as an example, a page about this incident is created immediately on the same date in the Wikipedia. [9] Contrary to Wiki, I cannot find any articles of this incident in Britannica. Therefore, if users want to look up some information about current issues, using Wikipedia will be more convenient for the users because of the real time update. 

Conclusion

Every coin has two sides, both Wikipedia and Britannica have their advantages and disadvantages. Although Wikipedia has its drawbacks, the benefits of Wikipedia overweigh the benefits of Britannica.

Bibliography:

[1] http://www.subscription.com/britannica/

[2]http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/186618/Encyclopaedia-Britannica?cameFromBol=true

[3] http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1101242/Paris-Hilton

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Hilton

[5] Kittur, A., Chi, E. H., and Suh, B. 2009. What’s in Wikipedia? Mapping Topics and Conflict Using Socially Annotated Category Structure In Proceedings of the 27th international Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia#Editing_model

[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica#Bias

[8] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4530930.stm

[9]http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Manila_hostage_crisis&dir=prev&action=history



Opinions on 'Modern Times'

1. What are the benefits of the new technologies (industrial machinery, feeding machine, closed circuit cameras) shown in the film? Who gains from these technologies?

A. The Standardization of the Products

One of the benefits of the industrial machinery is the standardization of the products because the quality of the products is easier to be controlled unless the machines are broken. Because (parts of) the products come from the SAME mold, SAME or even IDENTICAL (parts of) the products will be produced. The possibility of man-made mistakes would be minimized. As a result, the quality of the final products can be easier maintained. 

B. The Higher Efficiency of Production Rate

The machines can manufacture the products in a higher speed. In a factory, the system adopted is an assembly line which means that the production process of the products is divided into many small tasks. A specific group of workers  (Chaplin himself in this case) are responsible for a particular small task, every time they work, that group of workers performs and concentrates on the SAME PATTERN repeatedly. Since ‘practice makes perfect’, those workers are familiar with their own job and are the ‘experts’ of their own procedure. Then, they can not only perform better (because they know the skill), but also faster (because they get used to it).

C. Mass Production with Lower Cost

It is obviously the machines can help the mass production of the products. However, the most important point is that the cost of such mass production is lower INDIRECTLY with the help of machines (when it is compared with same amount of products produced without the aid of industrial machineries). Since, same amount of products are produced in a shorten time, both the wages of the labor and the electricity cost thus are reduced. As a result, there is a possible low unit cost for manufactured goods.

D. The Convenience brought by New Technology

Although it seems that the feeding machine brings a lot of problems in the movie, it may be useful and convenient in a certain sense, such as for the disabled people. Because of the new technology, the disabled people can eat by themselves without the aid of others.

Instead of going every department in person, the boss can stay in his office to watch the whole factory through the CCTV. The boss can monitor the working environment of the factory so that the workers are under control. He can command his workers with the microphone and speakers as well. It is much save time for the boss to do so. It can also avoid the laziness of the workers.

Conclusion

The Boss (capitalists) gains the greatest benefits from the advanced new technologies because these technologies help him to make the greatest profits. The consumers also gain benefits from the new technology because they can buy products with low price but high quality.



2. What is the effect of these technologies on the main character’s life/mood/body?

Charlie Chaplin or we can generalize to all factory workers are exploited by his boss. The boss does not allow them to take a rest from long working hours. The boss even speeds up the machine so the workers need to repeat the action in a faster pace. This reinforces the robotic action of the workers. Charlie even cannot control his body during the lunchtime. His hands still repeat the action unconsciously. It also reflects from the film that Charlie is so nervous and tense about his job. When he sees the buttons on a women’s dress, he thinks they are the things manufactured by the machines. Obviously, Charlie is deeply affected by his job.



3. What effects does using computers and the internet have on your life/mood/body?

It does not deny that computers and the internet affect me greatly. For the academic aspect, when we write paper or do project, we can look up the relevant information on the internet by the search engines. It would be convenient for us to do so because the search engines extract some key websites automatically for us to look at. As a result, we can glance the whole picture quickly. Comparing with the literature research in the library, we have to spend much more time to find a suitable book and relevant article.



An electronic typewriter



Besides, my hand writing is not good and thus the standardized font style would make our work neatly and tidy. Consequently, the work is easy to read. Although some people may think typewriter can achieve this purpose, the computer can have more different font styles and effects.

And the most important is that the word processing software helps us organizing our paper easily. We can edit our text before printing and need not ‘cut and paste’ physically. As Carol mentioned in class, she has to cut her paper in different sentences and then arrange them. The editing tool in the software is more user-friendly as we can ‘undo’ our action by a few buttons. We not only reduce using paper, but also save the physical space.

Sometimes I think I am addicted to the internet. I sit in front of the computer for long times or until midnight. My posture is not that appropriate. Therefore, my shoulder and the back are painful occasionally.

Bibliography:

[1]http://www.assembly-line-balancing.de/index.php?content=start&content2=start/
[2]http://www.advanced-planning.eu/advancedplanninge-373a.htm
[3]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet#Social_impact

Introdution

Marital Status: Married
Family member: 1 son, 1 daughter and a cat
Occupation: Deperate housewife

***What I want to say is that we CAN construct our own identity in the virtual world. Some information on the internet are true but some are not. We CANNOT 100% trust the information on the internet.***