Lost in Wikipedia

Wikipedia, the free collaborative multilingual encyclopedia, this month ( January 2011) is celebrating its 10th anniversary.

Its 17 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with the access to the site.

Wikipedia was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and has become the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet having 365 million readers.

The name Wikipedia was coined by Larry Sanger putting together Wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word Wiki, meaning “quick”) and encyclopedia.

In a BBC news magazine article which I downloaded entitled “LOST IN WIKIPEDIA” the journalist shows how most trips to Wikipedia start off legitimate, in a genuine effort to get pertinent information for the task we need but then a link catches the eye and there is the risk to get lost.

For example in an hour you can start your research from Aristotle, the Greek philosophers passing through the Newtonian physics ( which is defined as:” the set of physical laws governing and methodically describing the motions of bodies etc …); through the various links you can read about Salvador Dalì, the famous Spanish painter or about the Statics, which is “the branch of mechanics concerned with the analysis of loads on physical systems in static equilibrium “.

Surfing on Wikipedia you can learn a lot and you can have a trip through centuries of human knowledge but at the same time you can get lost in a ocean of information.

It’s incredible!

by Zeno Ferretti