Lab+8+-Transparency

Transparency and Functionality Wikipedia.com Wikipedia’s site is very easy to use, it allows quick access to any types of facts and even fuzzy searches terms you may be looking for by closely matching it. With a variety of topics and offered in almost all types of languages, it already seems like a very well established functioning factual database. When clicking on a topic you are given a slew of information, not only within the contents of the topic but it lists other topics that link to your original request if you are interested.

The frequency of updates can be seen by clicking “viewing history”, it lists all the users who edited the topic and shows what exactly they changed. This allows for some content management, it can be seen who is abusing the system and may show why something may have been corrected with a better source.

Wikipedia’s as a resource is somewhat damaged as they continue to upload content, questions arise at how factual and reliable these sources really are. By taking a look at its transparency we can see that all items on Wikipedia are openly edited by any type of users, while many users maybe legit a lot of users may be misinformed or generating false facts. On a quick look almost all resources are labeled as to where the information was received and what the statement is based on. At the bottom of the page these resources are listed and users may click the links to see if the resources are reputable companies. Some of the resources or statements on some topics may seem out of date, things may have changed but its hard to base if this is factual evidence at this time. Wikipedia may be seen as a “unreliable” database but essentially most of its content is moderated quite well, it seems that the abuse of some have established this taint on the site, its hard to not get basic information from this site. However with the addition of added resources at the bottom, a user can take a look at the source material and judge whether or not it is an academic source, something made up or non-existent.