A few weeks ago, I had set up a survey to gauge whether the readers of my blog would prefer to go for Wikipedia or Britannica as a source of information. The survey was launched and closed in the early days of this blog and therefore did not attract as many responses as would be needed to make any conclusions. However, it can bee seen that the majority of the surveyed readers have opted for Wikipedia.
Many of the traditionalists and the less informed would probably be shocked to see that kind of result.
So, why?
- Wikipedia has built a brand that is synonomous to convenient access to information
- Wikipedia is totally free
- Wikipedia does not represent a corporation and therefore sparing it the negative sentiments that many of the younger tech savvy users of the Internet have for corporations
- Wikipedia has proven to be a democratic space employing continuous improvements to ensure that its quality, through it accuracy rate, is comparable to that of the longer established paper encyclopedias
So those are some of the key reasons that I have been faced with through my conversations with some of the people in my class. However, I would also say that some part of Wikipedia's success that it is perceived to be created by the people for the people - which ironically for the Internet and its users sounds a bit like communism...
So is the future of the Internet a communist one?
No comments:
Post a Comment