Wikipedia

I found it really interesting that Wikipedia allows for all of it's material to be used in commercial pursuit.  Two things that really surprised me were that the biggest amounts of articles on Wikipedia are written in German, Japanese, and French and that only 1/3 of all the traffic is to the English Wiki.  I guess Jimmy is right in his idea that we think in English-centric ways about the internet.  I agree with the idea of  a free encyclopedia for everyone and the idea of Wikibooks in order to give people the literacy skills and knowledge to use the encyclopedias.  I also really like that they don't take a stand on any ideas - that they stay neutral.  It's important for a history of world information to be unbiased.  It is a great supplemental resource for school textbooks which are extremely biased overall.  The only thing that I kind of disagreed with was the idea of aristocracy in their groups of server editors.  I understand the two examples of people that he gave, but the idea that certain people hold the veto power over others who are less well-known rubs me wrong.

I'm not surprised that Wikipedia is hard to read especially with the topic of cancer.  It's an encyclopedia.  I remember doing research out of Britannica and having a hard time understanding the language, especially on scientific.  The website that the study compared it to is probably written specifically for patients.  The information on Wikipedia is for research basis.

I have used Wikipedia as background information sometimes.  I have never used it the other 3 ways described.


Inclusion (education) is the article topic I looked up.
1. There are no clean up banners
2.  The language is very clear, the information is complete, referenced, and neutral
3.  A lot of the  resources are books so it's hard to know if they are good or not.  One that didn't make any sense to me was a link to the Wiki page about the Utah Education Association.  It's not very long and makes no mention of inclusion.  The only thing related is that they are over the School of the Blind (which is not inclusive at all).
4.  Rated C.  Some of the people said that their wasn't much research and it seemed like a personal opinion essay, however, it is what we have learned in SPED classes about inclusion and doesn't  push for full-inclusion or for mainstreaming.  It simply shows both sides.
5.  Reliable