Wikipedia is a source that I’m sure just about every college student has used at one time or another, regardless of whether or not a professor has told him or her to stay away from the controversial site. People argue that Wikipedia is an unreliable source because anyone can edit it, and that you’ll end up with false information. I’ve always thought that for the most part, it would be pretty difficult to actually get completely false information from the site because the bad information is usually pretty easy to pick out of whatever article it is that you are reading, and after reading about the effort that goes into policing Wikipedia articles, I feel that this is even more true. While reading one of the articles from the syllabus, I was browsing from page to page that were linked together, and I ended up at a page listing the obituaries from Wikipedians, and some of those people were experts in their respective fields who spend quite a bit of time making sure that the correct information was on Wikipedia.
Also, I think that as time goes on, more and more people will continue to look to Wikipedia, as well as Web 2.0 related sites, for getting any information they might need, especially when it comes to younger students, because I’m sure that Wikipedia and various Web 2.0 projects are almost all that they know. Sure, they may have teachers that require them to gather information from many different sources, but Wikipedia is going to continually be the first place that they go to for their research needs.
When it comes to Web 2.0, I think that things are only going to continue to grow, especially considering that it is being used as a way to gain attention from younger people everywhere. As the article about Web 2.0 on Wikipedia stated, even universities are beginning to take advantage of Web 2.0 related sites to get students to their own websites and maybe to their schools. I could eventually see different businesses taking advantage of Web 2.0 in order to get the attention of young people in much the same way.
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