10 Years of Wikipedia
Wednesday 12 January 2011
Jimmy Wales: "Wikileaks is not a wiki"
Channel 4 News (UK) Interviews Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia.
This weekend sees the 10th anniversary of the website, Wikipedia. The online open sourced encyclopaedia has become an internet phenomena, famous for allowing anyone to contribute to and edit its entries.
However the scale of the site's success has also been blamed by some for affecting academic studies as students seek their answers online.
Co-founder Jimmy Wales was interviewed by Jon Snow who asked him if Wikipedia had just replaced homework, as students were just copy and pasting from the site?
"Yeah but the thing is your teachers also have Wikipedia and they will find out and you'll get an F on your grade so we don't think that's a huge problem, " replied Wales.
"What we do find is that young people are incredible passionate about Wikipedia. When I speak to a high school or a college, they're out of their minds for it."
However the ease with which people can publish entries has also lead to concerns about accuracy of the content on the site.
"When we've had academic studies comparing Wikipedia to traditional encyclopaedias we've come out very well. We haven't seen enough research done into that."
