Name: Using Wikipedia: Crash Course Navigating Digital Information #5
Uploaded: 2020-03-30T02:45:44.000Z
Duration: 14 min 16 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Hello and welcome to Crash Course: Navigating Digital Information, I'm John Green.

According to my Wikipedia page, I'm an American author, vlogger, writer, producer, actor,

I've released some books, won some awards, got married, had kids, and I have a brother

There's also a photo of me from VidCon in 2014 in which I'm wearing a football scarf

Now, you could've learned a lot of that stuff from my personal website--but then again,

I have a certain bias in how I present myself.

For instance, I would never write about Hank on my website.

He can start his own web site if he wants that free promo.

Also, as we've discussed through this series, you shouldn't use one single site as a definitive source.

When evaluating new information, we have to read laterally.

That means looking to other sources to provide context.

Now it's not always easy to find sources to consult, but when used correctly, Wikipedia

Right, I know that wikipedia can be unreliable.

My own wikipedia page once briefly said that I was a professional Lacrosse player.

And I am an actor only in the sense that I was cut from the one movie I appeared in,

but I do think we can use wikipedia for good.

So, many of us have been told by teachers,

librarians, parents, peers, coworkers, friends, pen pals, babysitters, nieces and nephews,

celebrity spokespeople, Instagram famous dogs, our favorite baristas, particularly cogent

toddlers, religious leaders, Jeff Goldblum, long lost cousins, and anonymous twitter trolls

You've probably heard that Wikipedia is full of totally unusable, unreliable information

Now, it's true that Wikipedia is editable by almost anyone, and its content is created

by a community of mostly volunteer Wikipedians.

The whole network is owned and supported by a non-profit, called the Wikimedia Foundation.

And Wikipedia has become the Internet's largest general reference work, with over

40 million articles in 301 languages, including over 5.7 million articles in English.

While you're there, you can learn about anything from the Gothic Bible to Whitney

Houston's 1985 hit “How Will I Know” to the absolutely terrifying star-nosed mole.

I don't know what it is about the star nosed mole, but it freaks me out so bad.

Now, you're not going to learn every single thing about a topic by reading its Wikipedia

The universe is much more complicated than even an endless online encyclopedia could

But what makes Wikipedia useful to citizens of the internet is its breadth.

It provides information on more topics than any print encyclopedia could, and a top-notch

Wikipedia page can provide a solid overview of a topic and also provide citations to sources

It's kind of like a tour guide -- it gives you a general lay of the land and shows you

Even fact checkers use Wikipedia to familiarize themselves with unknown topics.

Now, when Wikipedia first launched in 2001, it got a bad reputation because of how easy

Essentially anyone with an internet connection could log on and update their high school's

“notable alumni” to include their own name.

You could also delete your brother's Wikipedia page on the grounds that he wasn't a notable

That flexibility, to put it diplomatically, is likely why teachers and others have warned

But Wikipedia has grown up a lot since 2001.

Wikipedia is almost an adult--and it's starting to act like it.

Today anyone with an internet connection can still edit most pages on Wikipedia, but

there are much more rigorous content policies in place and more Wikipedians and even bots

Like, if you repeatedly add yourself to your high school's notable alumni section, you

can bet an editor will be close behind to keep you humble.

You also now have to be a registered user to create an article and article topics have

to meet a standard of notability before they can even be created.

Wikipedians also adhere to a set of rules when editing and writing content.

Their core content policies are summed up by three key phrases.

A neutral point of view, meaning content must be represented fairly, proportionately and

No original research, meaning all material must come from a published, reliable source.

Verifiability, meaning people reading and editing articles must be able to check that

the information comes from a reliable source.

Now, policies and rules are all well and good, but they're only as good as the people who

So volunteer Wikipedians act as writers and editors and also they keep each other in check.

There are also administrators, who have a higher level of authority, and they can do

things like delete pages, or respond to vandalism, or even lock a page so only certain people

They're regular Wikipedians in good standing with the community because they've proven

themselves to be responsible editors who use accurate, documented information.

As of the day we filmed this video, there are 1,206 administrators for the English Wikipedia

In contrast, there are over 34.8 million registered Wikipedians, about 134,000 of whom have edited

The good thing about this giant buddy system is that it has to be pretty transparent in

At the top of a Wikipedia article you'll see little tabs.

One says Article, that's pretty self-explanatory.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Using Wikipedia: Crash Course Navigating Digital Information #5

perspective

content

controversial

prone