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  3. Being the founder of the Internet’s largest encyclopaedia means Jimmy Wales

Being the founder of the Internet’s largest encyclopaedia means Jimmy Wales

游客2024-08-05  11
问题     Being the founder of the Internet’s largest encyclopaedia means Jimmy Wales gets a lot of bizarre emails. There are correspondents who assume he wrote Wikipedia himself and is therefore an expert on everything—like the guy who found some strange chemicals in his late grandfather’s attic and wanted Wales to tell him what to do with them. There are kooks who claim to have found, say, a 9,000-year-old fifteen-foot human skeleton and wonder if Wales would be interested. But the emails that make him laugh out loud come from concerned newcomers who didn’t know even the basic function of Wikipedia and have just discovered they have total freedom to edit a Wikipedia entry at the click of a button. "Oh my God," they write, "you’ve got a major security flaw.

    Wikipedia is a free open-source encyclopaedia, which basically means that anyone can log on and add to it or edit it. And they do. It has a stunning 1. 5 million entries in seventy-six languages—and counting. Academics are upset by what they see as info anarchy. An Encyclopaedia Britanica editor once likened Wikipedia to a public toilet seat because you don’t know who used it last. Loyal users claim that collaboration improves articles over time.
    But what exactly is a wiki and how does it work? Wikis are deceptively simple pieces of software that you can download for free.
    You then use them to set up a website that can be edited by anyone you like. Need to solve a thorny business problem overnight and all the members of your team are in different time zones? Start a wiki.
    Wikipedia is the cumulative work of 16, 000 people, the bulk of it done by a hard-core group of around 1,000 volunteers. Its 500, 000 entries in English alone make it far larger than the Encyclopaedia Britannica. And Wales pays just one employee who keeps the servers ticking. Naturally there are a lot of idiots, vandals and fanatics, who take advantage of Wikipedia’s open system to deface, delete or push one-sided views. Sometimes extreme action has to be taken. For example, Wales locked the entries on John Kerry and George W. Bush for most of the 2004 Presidential election campaign. But for the most part, the geeks have a huge advantage: they care more. According to an MIT study, obscene comments randomly inserted on Wikipedia are removed within 100 seconds, on average. Vandals might as well as be spray-painting walls with disappearing ink.
    As for edit wars, in which two geeks with opposing views delete each other’s assertions over and over, well, they’re not much of a problem these days. All kinds of viewpoints co-exist in the same article. Take the entry on Wikipedia: "Wikipedia has been criticized for a perceived lack of reliability, comprehensiveness and authority. " Indeed, Larry Sanger, Wikipedia’s former editor-in-chief(now a university lecturer), still loves the site but thinks his fellow professionals have a point. " The wide-open nature of the Internet encourages people to disregard the importance of expertise ," he says. Sanger doesn’t let his students use Wikipedia for their papers, partly because he knows they could confirm anything they like by adding it themselves. [br] What do people find out when they discover they have total freedom to edit a Wikipedia entry?
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答案 The basic function of Wikipedia．
解析 (第一段倒数第二句表明，很多新手不知道维基百科的basic function便是他们可以完全自由地编辑其中的任何一个词条。)
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