Celebrating its 10th anniversary as a larger-than-life online, joint collaborated encyclopedia, Wikipedia is embracing its survival of the dot com bust and boom. Starting as nothing more than a non-profit, communal effort, Wikipedia has expanded into one of the largest collectivized sources of data and information that man has ever known-and we're the reason for it all.
If you weren't aware before, Wikipedia is a "open" page for thinkers, casual knowledge junkies and common folk alike to contribute articles, edit entries and collaboratively assemble knowledge and history that comes from all over the world. Critics, especially those in the field of academia, often label the site as not credible and unsuitable for use in academic research, and virtually anything that requires proper citation and attribution of sources. The claims are generally unwarranted, though-various research, as long ago as 2005, has shown that Wikipedia is comparable in accuracy to the Encyclopedia Britannica.
One thing users often overlook is just how much regulation, editing and collaboration there really is. The Wikipedia site itself is self-regulated: the servers have built-in algorithms that detect changes to popular, preserved articles-"Abraham Lincoln," for example-and can remove blanking, factual inaccuracy and any sort of malicious activity in as quick as a few minutes, but some times can take hours for articles that are less regulated or not as preserved.
Credibility aside, it's nearly impossible to refute the overall contribution that Wikipedia has made in terms of raw, accessible information at a moment's notice. After all, most of us just Google a phrase in order to go straight to Wikipedia.