The starting point of this timely and excellent book is simple but very sound. While teaching their students how to use Wikipedia, not just as passive consumers but as active users, since after all Wikipedia boasts of being the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, the authors systematically noted that “everyone was using Wikipedia despite being told not to, and no one knew how it worked” (Preface, p. xi). The first of these two issues proves easy to solve: blind peer-reviewed analyses amply demonstrate that Wikipedia is no less reliable than other scholarly sources and similar publications. Moreover, there are no indications that its standards are weakening; on the contrary. In addition, there are good reasons to believe that Wikipedia is still “the last safe place” on the Internet, as shown by its successful battle against fake news and, more generally, its radically nonprofit character (on all these points, the comparison...
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June 2022
May 26 2022
Wikipedia and the Representation of Reality
Wikipedia and the Representation of Reality
by Zachary J.
McDowell
and Matthew A.
Vetter
. Routledge
, New York, NY, U.S.A.
, 2021
. 140 pp. Trade. ISBN: 978-0-36-755570-2. Open Access, Creative Commons, CC BY-NC-NDDOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003094081
.
Jan Baetens
Online ISSN: 1530-9282
Print ISSN: 0024-094X
©2022 ISAST
2022
ISAST
Leonardo (2022) 55 (3): 310–311.
Citation
Jan Baetens; Wikipedia and the Representation of Reality. Leonardo 2022; 55 (3): 310–311. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_r_02205
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