Lately a good wave from various columnists and educators is highlighting the dubious nature of Wikipedia along with its trustfulness of information on the topics which, the name and real identity of the real author is never been verified.
Important points raised against Wikipedia
Wikipedia Review itself has a huge collection of opinion, nicely compiled by Gomi, on January 1, 2008. In 2009, another good thought was published as Wikipedia criticism. Sam Vaknin in another article, nicely explained his view. Robert McHenry, former editor-in-chief of Encyclopædia Britannica said in November 2004 :
“…to the ordinary user, the turmoil and uncertainty that may lurk beneath the surface of a Wikipedia article are invisible. He or she arrives at a Wikipedia article via Google, perhaps, and sees that it is part of what claims to be an “encyclopedia”. This is a word that carries a powerful connotation of reliability. The typical user doesn’t know how conventional encyclopedias achieve reliability, only that they do.”
The problem is Wikipedia, as said rightly by Robert McHenry is not only the wrong image it carries with wrong informational bunch. It is a matter of fact, with tremendous Search Engine Optimization (both on page and off page), it comes on the top of almost all major keyword based search. If you really need any information about any health concern, it is not Wikipedia, but your Government’s Health Website is the most authentic source. If you are searching for a particular disease, Wikipedia is not an authentic and certified source – there are various websites and blogs written by eminent doctors and medical students which far exceeds the authenticity of Wikipedia.
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Wrong information on Wikipedia
You can read about other various examples of bias of Wikipedia on this website. Legally I can not point my finger towards any other topic on Wikipedia, but on the topics on health sciences on Wikipedia. For the patients, Wikipedia is a potentially dangerous source of wrong, keyword driven, outdated, without proper standard text book reference junk website.
Copy Paste under the hood of Open Source
Wikipedia, is basically a copy paste blog. Open Source never means copy paste and citing reference. You can understand the problem with Wikipedia created pages on persons – searching with Mullenweg, brings up Wikipedia ‘post’ on Matt Mullenweg on Google search; while Matt Mullenweg’s own personal website is pushed down to the second.
The combination of Wikipedia and Google Ads on Search Result pages for high value keywords is quite honestly not very user friendly to find a good informative website :
If you carefully look at the “reference” Wikipedia article on Cloud Computing, most direct links are towards the commercial websites, where as the links to some authoritative sites are not direct, rather towards the pdf and other documents. If you are a website owner, you know the reason why Wikipedia does it. The links to pdf or other files has no backlink value, but towards the direct commercial domains.
Just to mention, Wikipedia can make an SEO expert shameful with their on page optimization with right percentage of keywords, presence of bold, italic keywords in almost any article.
About Abhishek Ghosh
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