Wikipedia.org Review

Wikipedia.org

There's a game that people can play on Wikipedia called the Six Degrees of Separation. The theory goes that one can actually navigate to any topic or any person within only six clicks and therefore viewing six pages--only by using links contained on the first page one visits.

Wikipedia is simply a marvel of crowd-sourced information. Academics bring it up the first assignment of College Writing classes, students pretend like it's the truth, and it's growing every day by the grace of millions of contributors who have authored portions of each page.

The layout is a throwback to the 2000s during the age of a top navigation bar, side navigation bar, and nothing but articles in the middle. There are millions of articles to sift through and only twenty-four hours in the day. Its text is bare, peppered by the occasional image, and every once in a while annotated with a note that declares a citation is needed.

For the informational category:

    1. Is everything available at 1280*800 resolution without scrolling?

        Yes--with a twist. The only thing I could want out of an encyclopedia is a table of contents or a search function. That's the only useful thing that Wikipedia offers without scrolling. Everything else is clearly not consumer friendly and actually is intended for contributors.

    2. Is it visually appealing?

        No. It is a bare-bones, no frills website that delivers content in Times New Roman and .jpg with moderate to high resolution.

    3. Do I feel the experience of learning and understanding something after I'm done?

        Yes. No matter what the topic is, there is a Wikipedia article and a fan base that is rabidly supporting it and updating it.

Is it a good website?

On the ternary scale (0 being unreadable, 1 being unmemorable, and 2 being memorable), I give Wikipedia.org a big fat 2. Wikipedia is the go-to resource for topic research, period. As a STEM student, it's actually incredible to observe how faithful all of the STEM pages are treated with reverence to theory and definitions. As a fan of many TV Shows and comics and other entertainment media, Wikipedia is thorough and contains articles per character that go further in depth than the distributing websites.