How it Works: Wikipedia

Everyone now knows about Wikipedia and if you don't know, it is an online free encyclopedia developed by a non-profit organization. It has become one of the 50 most popular websites and in this article, I will tell you why it is not only a good resource for looking up information but also how it works. 

Wikipedia is run totally by the community and is known for its free "Edit this Page" tab above a page where anyone is allowed to edit this page by adding new content or editing the current. This is a great feature because it does not have to rely on the developers to find the information but gives volunteers within the community that have this knowledge to add what they know. But with this comes the spamming. Of course there are people out there on the WWW that just love to ruin everyones day by adding false information to pages. Now here is where Wikipedia relies on its community to change it back. Many people have gone in to pages and changed information to make it false just how fast the community can change it and they were overwhelmed by the response. I tested it myself by adding a URL to my website onto a page based on Animals in Space and in less than 5 minutes, it had disappeared!

Another thing that Wikipedia does very well is fix problems within the community. One of these problems are:  

What if a group that disagrees to one of the pages on Wikipedia gets enough people to join together and try to remove this page?

That would be very bad if that happens because what if it is a religious group that dislikes another religion. They can overpower the community and vote the page off the site. Well the development team just answers, we will bend the rules. If they think that removing this page is because of an opinion, then they will not. 

So overall, Wikipedia is a great website that gives the community full rights to change anything on the informative pages. It feels like you run this website but you have a duty to give the rest of the community true information. Thanks for reading!

All information was found on the video Jimmy Wales on the birth of Wikipedia on TED.com.