“Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.”— Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a Web based proyect; as it says in the main page of this website, Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia. This means that anyone with a computer with acces to Internet can take part in this proyect, as everybody who logs in and creates an account is allowed to edit information on any subject. The articles on almost any imaginable topic are therefore manufactured by volunteers,who add information, citations and cross-references in the context of this collaborative type of Website. This is why the concept of “liberty” plays a main role in the construction of this proyect.
In the year 2000, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger had the idea of founding a Website in wiki format, based on an earlier proyect called Nupedia, which also meant to become a free encyclopedia, elaborated by highly qualified contributors. Nupedia updated slowly, in contrast with Wikipedia, that has more than 75.000 active contributors, who work on more than 10.000.000 articles in more than 260 languages. Wikipedia updates almost continually, which creates a great alternative to the traditional encyclopedia. Its necessary to remark that Wikipedia is of non-commercial nature, as it depends on Wikimedia Foundation, which is a non-profit organization. The huge succes of this website is based on the tens of thousends visits it receives every day, and everybody is able to offer donations in order to “help the Wikimedia Foundation sustain Wikipedia and deliver new and innovative global programs to improve our quality, reach, and levels of participation.”
But is Wikipedia so free as it claims to be? An article was recently published in the newspaper “El correo” about the subject; it informs the reader abut the fact that Wikipedia is limiting the freedom of the collaborators to edit articles through this website, by introducing a team of editors whose job is to review every article that builds up the free encyclopedia, in order to erradicate possible mistakes, misinformation, unencyclopedic content and vandalism, which affects the website´s reliability, which is something that such a popular source of information such as Wikipedia cannot allow. This “filter System” has been widely criticized by a lot of Internet users who claim that it compromises the freedom of speech an creation, considering it as a kind of insult. But, as the jouranalist who wrote the article says, a tool of knowledge such as Wikipedia must be a secure source of information, not a site full of innacuracy and ignorance. And I must say that i totally agree.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About, Retrieved 2009, February 08, at 19:01
http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/, Retrieved 2009, February 08, at 19:13
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page, , Retrieved 2009, February 08, at 19:32
