Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said in ?stanbul on Friday that his user-built encyclopedia is not reliable and that college students should not be citing it in their reports. He said the fluid nature of the medium made Wikipedia unreliable and that a specific article might be good one day and weaker the next; then recover greater strength from a fresh edit.
"Though if you know what you're doing, it can be a great starting point, with references to all the sources on a controversial topic," said Wales.
Wikipedia itself avoids controversy, taking no stand on controversial issues. The freely licensed encyclopedia thrives on being politically neutral, a core principle along with free speech and free access to that speech.
Wales spoke to bloggers, techies and journalists at the Esma Sultan Yalisi in Ortaköy, ?stanbul in a seminar organized by Altivi, an online consumer electronics retailer.
Wikipedia is owned by a non-profit organization called the Wikimedia Foundation, but when Wales first dreamed of a free encyclopedia, he imagined running it as a business. Then came the dot-com bust, which led him to fit the concept into a non-profit mold.
Now he sees that turn as one of the best things that could have happened, for he believes the non-profit status lends it a credibility that would have been hard to obtain otherwise, which in turn helps explain why he is in no hurry to accept advertising on the encyclopedia's content pages.
The free online encyclopedia runs on a collaborative model of mutual trust, with people all over the world contributing to the spread of knowledge -- whether writing articles in English, Dutch or Japanese. The Turkish version of the encyclopedia, Vikipedi, had some 98,000 articles as of yesterday morning.
The encyclopedia has gotten some bad press over the years for various inaccuracies, but Wales said his main object is to have fun, to make sharing knowledge fun and to trust that everything will work out in the end.
"My philosophy is not to think things through too much in advance, but to let it happen," he said. "If people don't enjoy doing it, if they think of it as work, they won't keep doing it for free."
Source:Today's Zaman,Turkey