New Internet Generation - Wikipedia

New Generation Internet Class 3

In the third lecture of the subject New Generation Internet the lecturer supplied information about Wikipedia. The students of today are mostly already familiar with the source Wikipedia. In most cases Wikipedia is used for checking facts and finding information about study or work related topics. The new generation of young professionals, people, who are about to graduate University in the next 2 years, usually check Wikipedia as background source, which supplies them a broad view about the information they are looking for.

Wiki started in 1995 and after GNUpedia, and Nupedia, Wikipedia was launched on the Internet in 2001, a website which has 16 million articles today. Nowadays, there are different types of Wiki sources. The most famous and popular type is Wikipedia, but there are many other wiki sources like Wikimedia.com and wikitravel.com. The benefits of Wikipedia are inviting all users to create a page and promote meaningful information. Nowadays, Wikipedia is the 8^th most popular website worldwide and can be seen as the biggest collection of human knowledge. Wikipedia has a neutral point of view, has a free content and there are no firm rules that rule the Wikipedia program. Wikipedia is not a discussion forum, paper encyclopaedia or democracy experiment.

The key to success of Wikipedia is mainly because it is easy to edit, there are more constructors compared to destructors, Wikipedia is an organized community and if you as an editor wants to enter you need to agree on the basic principles given by the website community.

Wikipedia is ruled by the Wikipedia foundation and collaborates with a global network of other wikipedias in countries worldwide. There are different roles inside the Wikipedia network, think about registered user, check user, administrator etc.

The main advice of lecture 3 was that as a user you need to be careful if the articles you read are correct. If you are a user always check the sources of the article, watch history of changes and read the references.