My $0.02 on Wikipedia
By Patrick McDonnell
When one thinks of archives, Wikipedia, the self-proclaimed free encyclopedia, might not jump out as a candidate, yet in its own way, its free nature and desire to spread info, makes it an excellent body to examine under the archival lens.To start
- It is a space which houses information purposefully put there to be examined, used, and even corrected - thus making it a "type" of archive
- It has the intention of actively informing millions of people a day - making it one of the most used archives in the world
- It is incredibly important in proving basic facts for users and often helping with further research interest by proving sources - making it a well visited "introductory archive"
Yet, what makes Wikipedia incredibly interesting is that unlike other more traditional archives, its content is solely curated by other users. This means that anybody with a computer can add or subtract information on Wikipedia which they think is suitable regardless of their credentials. Now logically thinking, one would assume that the information on Wikipedia would not be correct and ironically when I tried to find a reliable source to cite to see how accurate Wikipedia is, the first article that came up was Reliability of Wikipedia By Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia) which begins to spin the tale of a self-fulfilling prophecy of inaccurate information.
Despite how accurate the actual information is, Wikipedia seems to convey a sense of legitimacy most likely because it obscures the editors from the viewers, thus we usually assume that the articles are correct until proven otherwise. Perhaps this speaks more to the idea that we naturally trust achieves too much and should perhaps be more critical of the information that we are reading because just about anybody could have written it.