photo credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com
What is Wikipedia?
Simply put, Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia with content input by volunteers worldwide. Only begun in 2001, it already has 10’s of millions of articles in hudreds of languages. There are certain standards and editing policies, but anyone is welcome to contribute. Basically the group polices itself; it is like an “open source” of knowledge.
With hundreds of thousands of people researching and contributing to Wikipedia daily, you may find the article you read last year is totally different today; if a volunteer editor disputes some text or finds it not up to standards it will be removed or edited. What is important to take away from this is, what you are reading may be erroneous because it has not been verified or updated. Usually the older information is true, because it has withstood various editors’ scrutiny.
Here are some good tips on how to use Wikipedia.
To find a knowledgable author on topics for which you need articles written, type in the name of the topic. Then click on the history tab and there will be a listing of authors with their contact information.
If you want to track stories, again, select the history tab, and select the RSS feed to subscribe. To get it on your mobile you can use wapedia.mobi.
Hyper-local? To read articles on topics near you geographically (this is cool) you can use Google Maps. Type in an address or location, and then look in the bar in the top right corner; there is a Wikipedia option (the “W” icon). Select it and you will see the icons in the location you selected if there are articles on people, places, or things in that area.
Want to read Wikipedia articles without all the blue links? You can first select ‘printable version’ in the sidebar, or add the text “&printable=yes” (without quotes) into the URL.
To give the proper credit when using Wikpedia, be sure to use the current “permanent link” in the sidebar; the article may be quite different when your readers see it later.
Tip: Try powerset to help search articles.
