Wikipedia is here to stay

I had only recently in the last few years started to hear some buzz about Wikipedia's surprising level of reliability when I started to assimilate into the education community through music education conferences and workshops. I had no idea about the rating system or the coordination that goes into maintaining pages on the site though, and I was quite shocked at first! Now I almost feel compelled to go out and start looking for pages to supplement, although I probably won't go that far until I have more free time on my hands. This in itself goes to show that education and learning are collaborative because complete strangers around the world are coming together to provide anyone with an internet connection easy access to knowledge for free. I think it’s important to keep the love of learning alive in students and providing such easy access to knowledge will help fuel this love, but it is important that we teach students to evaluate the credibility of their sources and teach them how to research properly. 

I think it’s extremely valuable to have such a massive database of knowledge on pretty much anything you can think of in a digital and changeable format. Information changes constantly as new things are being discovered, and as those discoveries happen the documentation can change with it in real-time, and we will never lose that access as long as technology still survives. There has been so much documentation, culture, and knowledge lost to age or deliberate destruction over time, more than we could even fathom. I often think about the Library of Alexandria and wonder what information we could have still had access to if it hadn’t been devastated. I find it comforting that there is so much information stored on the internet that will never be destroyed.

The Library of Alexandria