In today’s society, the idea of freedom of information has always been something we grasped at. Anyone could simply pull out their phone and ask Siri to search something, anything but from whom does Siri pull the information from? To answer that we need to look deeper than most people realize, we need to analyze the information we are given, and see how it affects our daily lives. So to answer that million dollar question, there is a simple answer, one source to rule them all, one source that tells us anything we need, Wikipedia. Wikipedia has always been the major source of information for the American population, and we constantly rely on it to win a bet or prove your friend wrong. While we sit here using Wikipedia for information that affects our everyday lives, we deny Wikipedia being credible, why is this? When searching for something we trust the information that Siri pulls for us, we trust what the first result it, so why isn't Wikipedia credible?  So, the major issue is in the credibility of user-generated content. Along with that, can this content be protected from self-promotion and things of that notion? Finally, if we are able to protect it, institutions such as schools should verify and allow this source to be used So when you look at the big picture and see just how useful Wikipedia can be, I hope you can agree with me that Wikipedia can and should be validated to be used in schools.
	In today’s world, trust in news is hard to gain, easy to lose, so who can we trust? Most people use the news source their parents used growing up, these things tend to follow generations. Like all revolutions it takes a spark, it takes a big spark to start the fire. People’s minds aren’t changed that easy, and when they had learned something growing up it tends to stick with them for quite a while. When I ask them why, they all provide the same answers, “The information is written by multiple authors so you can’t validate [the information]”. By saying this you are some what correct, Wikipedia articles are written by (and edited by) multiple authors, but that does not mean it loses credibility.  If we dive deeper into the inner workings of Wikipedia we discover an easily accessible tab on every page. This tab named, “View History” (As seen in Diagram 1) allows anyone (logged in or not) to view the history of any Wikipedia page. The history of the pages provides detailed accounts of dates and times that details within the page were edited, everything from a bot correction to removed self-promotion. This is an extremely useful tab that institutions and teachers alike completely ignore. They say you can’t track information down, but you can, it’s all laid out for you. One thing that the “View History” button shows us is who created the article, along with that it shows us something that is often overlooked. It shows us the true nature of the articles, it shows us that most of the information is actually from one person, the original creator of the article. If we are to pick an article, any article, it shows that the original creator of the article did most of the information adding, all the users did was edit the article. To show this let’s dive deeper, Wikipedia has two different types of articles, featured and non-featured. In order to get an accurate sample let’s pick an article by random out of the “non-featured” section of Wikipedia. Now there is some objections to this, some of the articles don’t have any citations to credible information, luckily Wikipedia shows this at the top of the article (See diagram 2). So for the sake of this article, I’m  going to pick one that does have cited sources (Article that i'm using). If we use the feature I talked about earlier (“View History”) we can see another tool within there, it’s called, “Oldest” (See diagram 3). This tool shows us the oldest edits (or data creation) for the article, if we want to find out who wrote this article we can easily use this tool and scroll down. This particular article is written by someone that goes by the username of “Jerry Seinfeld”, so when people say you can’t track the information down, they are wrong, it’s all laid out right there for everyone to see. The simple fact is that, people don’t bother looking for the information shown right in front of them. Now it’s great and all that we have the original author and we can see what they reference when creating their articles, but the thing people care the most about is all the edits. To me, this is completely irrational, why do you care so much more about the small details of the articles? Now,  into the whole “edits” issue, contrary to popular belief, the edits are actually controlled and regulated.
There are two different safe keys Wikipedia has put in place to prevent against issues such as; self-promotion and inappropriate links. One of the safe keys in place is the feature of Wikipedia bots, bots are able to do the same things as humans just much faster. To describe to you the big help from bots on Wikipedia, you can view a list of all the bots currently active on Wikipedia, and how many edits they have made. Also on that page are some nifty diagrams and pie charts to describe to you all, just how much of a difference bots make on Wikipedia. To save you the trouble of scrolling and looking, there are currently over 150 active bots! The page that was linked, unfortunately, hasn’t been updated since two thousand-fourteen. For the sake of references, we will count it as updated still keeping the information even though more bots have been updated and more edits have been made. If we take the top bot from that list, “Sidebot”, we can see (if we click on it), that it shows that it has over five million edits, it also has a special tag called “admin bots”. Understanding how to get this tag, and understanding what it means is key to understanding bots. The “adminbots” tag means that, the bot is created by, and ran by, an Admin from Wikipedia. These Admins are limited and working on a volunteer basis, so they help out a lot. Now this tag gives the bot special permissions, it allows the bot to have access to everything that the Admin has access to. For instance, both the bot and the Admin, have access to banning (and unbanning) users based on what they do. While this bot mainly handles simple grammatical and spelling errors, other bots can handle anything from self-promotion to changing links from “http” to “https”. This is a great help to Wikipedia as it helps make the website a lot cleaner and safer for the average user. The bots can be easily created and used so anyone can help with the effort!
Now, you could read about all of this information but what will that do for you? What you really care about is the facts, the facts show you what has been in front of you the whole time. In december of 2005, Nature did a study between Wikipedia and the professional encyclopedia, Britannica. If you didn’t already know, Britannica is an encyclopedia that pays experts to both review and and create their articles, it is considered to be “credible” by several institutions. This study was crucial to showing just how Wikipedia compares to a “credible” source that is run by experts in their particular field. In the study, Nature asked independent authors to compare similar articles on the same topics from both Britannica and Wikipedia. The results are shocking at the very least, Nature showed that Wikipedia has less than ⅓ more errors. (Nature). Considering that Wikipedia is completely volunteer run, that’s a pretty good rating compared to a source that pays experts and is used in schools all across the country. So ask yourself this, why is Wikipedia just outcased to the side when the evidence is right there and very obvious? It’s safe to say that Wikipedia can compete with the level of credibility from sources like Britannica.
	As information passes from father to son and on, they tend to carry over the traditions that have been in the family for centuries. Along with the information, the way families get their information is also carried down through the generations. Times are changing though, new information sources are popping up and we need to be able to use these sources without us having to worry about formalities. Wikipedia is shown to have close to the amount of errors as an encyclopedia that pays experts to write and edit their articles, it should be used along with all the other sources.  Why are we not allowed to use it, if it compares this well to all the sources that are currently credible? Wikipedia isn’t what everyone thinks it is, it is filled with references to credible sources. Along with all the references it is controlled to some extent and is regulated by people who just want to provide quality information at an accessible level.  Hopefully you can see that there is a credibility to Wikipedia.