Summative Blogpost - WIKI

I enjoyed reading what people had to say with regards to my blogpost about Wikipedia. First, Colin brought up the issue of bias material on Wikipedia, and how I think that is the main issue. He said that it isn’t the fact that people are bias, because truly everyone is, it is the fact that these comments are posted anonymously and therefore we can’t do a background search on these people to see if they are legit. I didn’t think of it like this, but I really enjoy this point. If we could see who posted ideas and comments on Wikipedia we could than see if they themselves are a reliable source. As Colin said, they can hide behind their bias, which makes it an issue. I think the idea of Wikipedia is the fact that it is anonymous and therefore everyone is equal when commenting, so I highly doubt they will change that even though it does raise issues about the idea of bias.  Michelle, the second posting raised different ideas and issues. I enjoyed her perspective on re-thinking and re-wording comments as more information is brought to light in the future, this relates to the community involvement of Wikipedia. The only problem with believing Wikipedia is completely community involvement is that although anyone can comment and share their opinion only certain types of people are actually going to log on and do so, one article says only 13% of people are actually creators the others don’t participate in development. Also as talked about in the articles, people post their opinion to satisfy themselves, so although it is supposed to be a community effort, most views aren’t for the community. Michelle discusses how different viewpoints, religions and cultures have different views which may clash, but I think this is a good thing. It shows diversity and different viewpoints on a given topic. Canada is a multicultural country and I think we can continue to learn more by listening to others. Even though I do agree with her that it brings chaos sometimes (lol). They both talked about different things, Colin focused on bias (which isn’t always bad) while Michelle focused on the communal aspect of Wikipedia. Overall I agree with Colin that because the posts are anonymous, we can’t form an opinion of the author, if we could we would be able to make our own assumptions of the topic. Michelle talks about it becoming harder to adapt to change in technology because it is always improving. I agree with this statement, I am 20 years old (you’d think I’d be pretty good with technology) and I still feel behind on the times.

Thanks for the comments Colin and Michelle!