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The Daily Tar Heel
On The Wire

Wikipedia celebrates 10th birthday

At the turn of the millennium, Wikipedia did not exist.

Now — just ten years later — it is a household name.

Dubbed the ‘free encyclopedia’, Wikipedia is an online collaboration between strangers that has led to the publication of over 17 million articles in more than 270 languages around the world.

Many Wikipedia events are being planned to celebrate the ten-year anniversary of the Internet tycoon on January 15, 2011, like a gathering at a coffee shop called Jackson’s Java near UNC-Charlotte.

Such events can be found online at Wikipedia 10 — a web-site set up to allow people worldwide to share their celebrations.

Although Wikipedia is the place to go to get fast facts and basic research, professors urge students to remember it is not necessarily credible and needs to be double-checked if used for more than gaining general knowledge.

One professor urging this standard is Ralph Byrns, a UNC professor of economics.

“I see it as something people could use as an initial source, but I wouldn’t rely on it as a source for factual information or a good summary of theories without having other sources,” said Ralph Byrns, a UNC professor of economics.

“But for quick and dirty search, Wikipedia is awfully good,” he said.

Byrns said he uses Wikipedia about four times a month, and has even corrected information posted by other people.

“I don’t think students should avoid it, they should simply be very careful,” Byrns said.

“Wikipedia can give you a feel for a certain subject matter, but I would just be careful using

Wikipedia because there is a certain amount of bad information on it,” he said. “It might be 95 percent good, but the 5 percent bad says you need to be very careful.”

Byrns said students might plagiarize using Wikipedia.

Sabina Ahmad, a senior health policy and management major at UNC, said she also thinks Wikipedia is helpful but not necessarily accurate.

“I think it is useful to find out info that you don’t know about, like the French revolution or something, but it’s basically like a source that points you in other directions,” Ahmad said.

“If you want to clarify that the facts that you are reading are true, you have to go elsewhere for accurate information,” she said.

As for the future of Wikipedia, Byrns had a few ideas.

“It saves time — you don’t have to go to the library,” he said. “I suspect that it is going to continue to improve and accuracy is going to get better.”

“More and more fairly serious academics will find ways to put their things in Wikipedia so that it is accessible to the general public,” he said.

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