How wikis have influenced and changed the world

In my opinion, from the list of new medias provided, wikis is the one that influenced and changed the world the most in my opinion.

The best place to start talking about how wikis changed the world would be in the physical world that we constantly interact with, the biggest physical item that was changed were the encyclopedia, they were made obsolete, I was about to make an example of how there were still uses for encyclopedias in places without access to internet, but I read an article during my research that claimed you could download all of Wikipedia in about 50gb without images and 100gb with them. If you think about it 50gb is really only a large USB worth, as long as you have access to the internet at some point you could download and carry the whole website of Wikipedia with you, and not a single encyclopedia is able to compete with that.

As wikis are digital, it would only make sense that the biggest impact that they would have is in the digital world, and the biggest impact that they had is on the way that that information travels and gets collected on the internet. The two biggest examples of this that cover the ranges of wikis, would have to be Wikipedia and Wikileaks. With Wikipedia there isn’t much to explain as it isn’t complicated, it is a website that anybody can edit that is using the power of the crowd to slowly collect information about the world. Tho funnily enough almost every teacher that I’ve ever had that mentioned Wikipedia always claimed that it is not to be trusted, but for some reason none of them mention that almost everything on there has a citation, sometimes even multiple, and people just have to scroll down to the bottom of the page to find the sources. Wikileaks is an interesting example of a wiki, it could be said to be the darker side of wikis in general, not due to its content as even Wikipedia has morbid material but due to its potential possibilities, to keep their integrity and reputation they have to publish anything that a person claiming to be a whistle-blower gives to them. Unlike with Wikipedia, if someone published false information, that info will eventually be removed by other users as different information is unearthed and there is a good chance that no-ones reputation would have to suffer too greatly, but in my research about Wikileaks I ran into multiple mentions of governments and organizations allegedly publishing information that was true or false to either smear some country or organization, or to distract from their blunder / embarrassment.

Wikis not only exist to document reality, but also fiction in many of its forms, a fun bit of information about that (that I can’t source as I lost the article that I read it in), one of the articles that I read claimed that there were 6 times more articles about fiction then about reality.


In my opinion wikis will probably never die out now that the format is so popular, they shall continue to grow and collect information until articles start reaching such length and complexity that there will start a new layer of wiki that will be about summarizing the existing articles. I believe that wikis are one of the most important parts of the internet as we know it, and if for some reason we suddenly list them, it would be a major step backwards in development of the internet, human knowledge and education. 


Sources:

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks
  • https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=download+wikipedia
  • https://www.mediavillage.com/article/impact-of-wikis-wikipedia-and-wikileaks/
  • https://business.tutsplus.com/tutorials/what-are-wikis-and-why-should-you-use-them--cms-19540
  • https://educationaltechnology.net/wikis-in-education/
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Wikipedia

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