Did you know that Wikipedia was the 19th most visited site on the web?
The Village Voice reports:
Clay Shirky, a technology and new-media professor at NYU, describes the site as a mix of political philosophies—"a creamy communist exterior with a crispy libertarian center." Wikipedia forces an uncomfortable issue for academics, he says. "Where does authority come from? Brands? Institutions? It's not so clear. And it never has been. That's why the site is so threatening."
Traditional scholars feel jeopardized by a population of nerds they hardly knew existed. In 2004, Robert McHenry, the former editor in chief of Encyclopaedia Britannica, wrote an essay for Tech Central Station comparing Wikipedia to a public restroom: You never know who's been using the facilities. "If this were a private enterprise, like a multiplayer game, that'd be fine," he tells the Voice. "It's like, 'Let's play the encyclopedia game, kids!' But to take the product of this game and call it an encyclopedia—that's where the deception comes in. The project is anti-educational, anti-science, and anti–everything that I think is a value."
Here's a good example of how the web has taken on established institutions and decentralized information.Need further proof.Check out this fact from the article,Wikipedia has:
more daily visitors than The New York Times and USA Today sites combined, is as much an encyclopedia as a social outlet.
You'll want to read the whole article.
