After 2 months of writing an article and posting it on Wikipedia, my article, “American Egyptomania” has been placed into a category with a lot of other articles called “Category: Orphaned Articles.” On top of my article being placed into this category, I’ve received no feedbacks or comments on my article. I don’t really know if this is a good or bad thing, but knowing that it was filtered into the category of orphaned articles doesn’t really surprise me. In a span of two months, I don’t think there would be a lot of people searching on the topic, “American Egyptomania” as much as something far more interesting and broad as a Hollywood icon.

Throughout middle school and high school, when we were assigned topics to research and we had to write up a citation page, teachers would always warn us that a free encyclopedia such as Wikipedia was not a proper and accurate site to use. In my personal opinion however, I think Wikipedia is what it is….it is a “Free” Encyclopedia. Sure, some information may be wrong and inaccurate, but there are still accurate information that they provide which is backed up by a source or linked to another website. However it is, more of less, the Web, repackaged and reformatted. I will admit that despite warnings against using Wikipedia, I have cited to Wikipedia on rare occasions and for very similar reasons, to web searches on Google for a very open ended topic or for a specific term. Personally, the difference between citing Wikipedia and citing a Web search is just a matter of the target’s format. Wikipedia entries generally look nicer, but other that that, Wikipedia and the World Wide Web are very nearly the same thing. Wikipedia’s openess to both creation and revision, doesn’t guarantee much of an accuracy so that is one thing that users have to watch out for. The information that they are receiving may in fact be falsified sometimes. All in all,I think that searching the Web’s messy data for specific terms, if not a good way to find authoritative information reliably, an extremely helpful step in my process of research.

Nowadays it seems many people are at pains to warn the public (and particularly “students”) that everything you see on a website is not true. Clueless people were out there posting crazy things on websites, spewing misinformation. Now, it seems, we all have internalized that fact and moved on — such articles still pop up now and then, but not nearly as frequently. And–surprise!–it seems we’re all still using the Web and we all find it pretty useful–perhaps more useful now than ever, given the improvements in powers of search. Overall, I think that Wikipedia is just a reflection of the Web in regards to the question of reliability and verifiability.