Wikipedia was founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. It is owned by the Wikimedia Foundation, and is a well-known and used website, which gives information about millions of subjects. It is an online encyclopedia, whose entries are created by people from all over the world. What are the strengths and weaknesses of Wikipedia? What kind of future does it have? This essay tries to analyze these questions based on the commentary of 3 articles from, "Mail Online," "The Guardian," and, "The Economist," respectively published in 2012, and 2014, by Amy Oliver ("Iffy-pedia"), Anne Perkins ("Whose truth is Wikipedia guarding?") and an unknown last author ("The future of Wikipedia: Wikipeaks").
Wikipedia is a very successful website. Wikipedia very accessible for anyone who has internet thanks to it's online presence. It is also a diverse and voluminous source of information. Indeed, it covers 1600 times as many articles as the Encyclopedia Britannica, from the usual and ordinary ("Spaghetti") to the unexpected and unique ("Spaghetti code" or "SpaghettiOs"). If a print version existed, as a group of German fans are trying to realize, it would represent around 1,000 volumes of more than a million pages, for the English version only. Wikipedia also edits in almost 300 other languages.
This extraordinary source for knowledge must thank its public contributors for this; the crowd-sourced creation system is the peculiarity of Wikipedia. This is also why Wikipedia is so popular. Everyday, 15% of all internet users visit the website, which means almost 500 million visitors a day. This system indeed provides an apparent transparency, along with the fact that it is not a commercial foundation. It has established an infinite peer review of the articles written, so that the readers can trust them to be reliable, for both school homework, curiosity, and corporate presentations.
