Lesson From Wikipedia

Based on my late research, Wikipedia is online encyclopedia which every reader can search to find terms in the Internet for free.

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales described Wikipedia as "an effort to create and distribute a multilingual free encyclopedia of the highest quality to every single person on the planet in his or her own language." Wikipedia exists to bring knowledge to everyone who seeks it. "

Referring to Wikipedia,

" By law the contributions are still owned by people who donated them. These people are not bound by the license and can use their property in the way they like. However media with multiple authors require permission from every contributor to use them differently from the terms of the Wikipedia license"

The scary part is that Wikipedia is not as trustworthy source of information. Although many people like to refer to Wikipedia as their learning source. I once found the errors on Wikipedia. There were information discrepancies even between Wikipedia in Thai language and Wikipedia in English language.
As the world is now changing, people google everything they want to know. The more we search information on Wikipedia, the higher chance that Wikipedia will be shown in google search engine ranking. When massive number of people search certain keywords, they will find a lot of information on Wikipedia which can be right or wrong. In addition, people refer to Wikipedia as a source. The dangerous part is that people refer to the untrustworthy source as a source. Therefore, mistakes/errors will NOT be corrected if no one finds it.Garbage in will finally be garbage out. As students and teachers do not cross check or validate information on Wikipedia, they can end up telling others wrong information. The others will keep telling the same wrong information to others.

Especially now there are social networks, such as facebook and twitter. The  wrong information has become powerfully socialized. I will discuss more about Wikipedia in my official research paper.

Although I write the negative aspect of Wiki because it is related to my class research paper, I strongly believe that having Wikipedia is better than nothing. The way to benefit from it is to use coupled with other source of information. Like anything else in the world, Wikipedia offers benefit and disbenefit.

My last comments would be:
" Don't we think having Wikipedia is better than nothing?"  Just because some media condemns it, that does not mean it is bad. Nothing is perfect. Wikipedia is a form of social media which can be right and wrong.
Media is influenced as well as social media, and Wikipedia is one of the social media because underlying principle is based on information from different sources.