What is a wiki? Basically, a wiki is a website where users can collaboratively modify content. The name comes from the Hawaiian word for quick.
Basically, a site where pretty much anyone can change what the site says. For an encyclopedia, that sounds like a disaster waiting to happen but in
general, it works surprisingly well.
As at the latter part of 2018, there is currently over five and a half million articles on the English language version of Wikipedia with a total of more than forty million articles in over 300 languages. Not bad for a site that started in 2001
Realistically Wikipedia is a great place to look up general information but you have to understand that just because it’s on the site doesn’t make it the
truth. That said you could say the same about anything on the internet. If you do like to believe everything you read on the Internet, I urge you to click on this link to the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus and leave a comment about it below.
The joy of it being a wiki, of course, is that if there’s a topic you’re a subject matter expert on, you can correct or even create a page subject to some conditions. Some pages have forms of locking on them to prevent vandalism and can only be edited by registered users or administrators.
That said there is tons of useful and correct information on Wikipedia.
It’s a great place to look up geographical information like the population or area of a country, it’s great for finding the exact size of a queen mattress in
your home country or the technical specifications of the new iPhone XR.
It’s also a great place to read up about technology new and old, governments, plants, brands or whatever. There’s even a random article linked in the left menu if you really can’t decide what to read.
There are even games that use Wikipedia. Known by the name Wiki Racing or just The Wikipedia Game, where two or more people pick a starting page and attempt clicking on internal links to get to a predetermined destination page the fastest.
Leave a comment below with a great Wikipedia link that you found.
I hope that was really useful for you.
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