Let The Puzzle Pieces Bring You Knowledge (wikipedia.org)

Member Name: GramiWay

Product:	wikipedia.org
Date:	21/05/09 (63 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good resource of information, lots of different languages

Disadvantages: Not always reliable

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia offering information on literally anything you can think of. The site is seen as the ultimate resource for knowledge on the internet being both free to use running purely on donations and is avaliable in a vast variety of different languages.

The name of the project derives from the term 'wiki' which is a series of web pages grouped together and of course 'pedia' which takes its name from encyclopedia.

At the time of writing this review, the site boasts that since it was launched by creators Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001 it has published and holds 12 million unique articles with 2.8 million of those being in the English language.

The website URL is www.wikipedia.org and you are greeted by a rather dull home page. The site is very well presented and locating the relevant information is easy enough though it's not very attractive to have to read through hoardes of text on a plain and unimaginative white background. Wikipedia's main logo is a picture of a sphere shape that is made up of jigsaw puzzle pieces with each piece having various symbols for different languages on it.

You can search for what you're looking for in the toolbar below this or select a language from the options that are placed around the aforementioned sphere. If your search is an exact match, Wikipedia will take you straight to that page.

Sometimes it may take you to a list of search results that match certain terms used in your search, or if you type in something that has multiple meanings for example 'supernatural' which can relate to the phenomonm itself, various TV shows or a Santanna album, it will take you to the most commonly viewed page and offer other pages with the same term.

Each page is set out with a small introduction followed by a list of topics that will be covered. If it's a long article, its best to click on the relevant heading you're looking for in this contents tab.

Information is often clumped together in large paragraphs though photographs and diagrams sometimes break this up. Most of the ambiguous information presented on the pages are cited and the links to where the user got the knowledge from are provided at the bottom of the page.

Possibly the greatest and most biased part of Wikipedia is that it allows its members to enter information. This is as simple as selecting the 'edit this page' tab at the top of each article. The site has been built solely on volunteers that have given their time to trawl across the web and bring together vast amounts of data on all sorts of different areas to one place, but giving internet users such an opportunity as to write what they see fit on a particular subject is obviously going to be open to a lot of manipulation as I myself have proved that it's easy to just log in and change any page with whatever claptrap you feel like spouting.

Of course Wikipedia are on the ball and erase all knowledge of this as soon as possible but it doesn't change the fact that what you read on here could largely be just somebody's own opinion and may be biased towards revealing information in a certain way.

This is probably the most true when it comes to music. Looking at pages that focus on music singles or albums for instance are often open to manipulation by hardcore fans or 'haters' that will post false sales facts and other such rumours.

I personally prefer to use Wikipedia as background reading for when I'm writing an assignment or am just interested in looking up a favourite show or book. I'd never take any information from the site and present it in an essay or any type of academic work as it's not looked upon with such glossy expressions in universities and such.

That said if you're after general information about any topic that springs to mind, Wikipedia is the place to go. There's yet to be something I've searched for that doesn't have just a small page dedicated to it.

Summary: One of the leading ports of information on the web