FourNames

Wikipedia vs. KNOL

Project description:

Our project is to examine specific meta-design products.  These products are Wikipedia and KNOL.  Each of these is an online encyclopedia that is modified and extended by many users throughout the world.  They are not made solely by one person or one group of people, but are created through the collaboration of the worldly online community at-large.  We are going to attempt to determine strengths and weaknesses of each of these encyclopedias, specifically focusing on areas such as coverage of material, relevance of material, credibility, and how up to date the material is.  Then, our group will compare these findings between each of these encyclopedias and possibly other non-meta-design encyclopedias like Britannica.  Our goal is to see how a meta-design product such as Wikipedia and KNOL can affect the society's knowledge base and what possible implications this can have.

Also, our group is going to look into how these meta-design products really work.  In order to accomplish this we will be creating, extending, or modifying some Wikipedia article and then track the what exactly happens to it over time.  We also plan to attempt some article sabotage in which we modify existing articles or varying popularity with modifications of varying "obviousness."  The reason behind this is that we wish to find out how effective Wikipedia is at controlling its articles.  This will also give us some insight into how much people can truly rely on information from a meta-design product such as Wikipedia.  As a group we have already realized that encyclopedias like these two can be great sources of information.  However, we have been told for much of our school career that we are not to trust an informational site that can easily be modified by anyone with a computer and a network connection.  This is why we wish to expand our knowledge in this realm and explore the depths of the meta-design products Wikipedia and KNOL.