Wonder if others feel the same way? If you go back in your memory for about 10 years ago you would remember the world was a much kinder place. People seemed to see each other more – poking and chatting on Facebook don’t count. More importantly, you would always find people helping each other out.
Kindness Campaign
Not to sound like my parents, and to control the amount of selective memory enhancements that I apply, I hit the web looking for examples of how kindness changed with the advent of the web. One of the first things I came by was a wonderful talk (embedded at the end of this post) that was both inspiring and amusing. From there, I kept on looking for how the web helped to make the world a better place – one person at time.
My findings give the impression that, if anything, the internet enabled many acts of kindness to occur. According to some, the whole internet could collapse if it weren’t for those acts of kindness. So here are some places on the net where kindness is alive, well and plentiful!
1. Free Rice
Feel good about yourself and have fun at the same time. This website will make donations of rice in partnership with the WFP for every word you guess correctly. Not much can be said about this site other than it’s all around awesome. [link to Free Rice]
Free Rice
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While reading the latest ReadWriteWeb article “Google News May Add Wikipedia as a Source”, the question of news integrity crossed my mind. After conducting some research, I came up with the following rationalizations:
- The “too many eyes” theory: When a service is constantly being monitored by many concerned parties, excellence in performance is a must! The more the number of eyes watching, the better the content; this applies to Wikipedia.Try visiting Wikipedia, choosing any topic and editing its content to something useless like “bla, bla, bla!”, wait for a few minutes and then recheck. You will find that the useless content has been removed and replaced with the original content by one of the readers. This is a great example of data integrity on Wikipedia.
"Too Many Eyes" By: Ken Sotrch
- The “reliable news sources” assumption: Why do we always assume that NYT is more reliable that Techcruch, for example? Is it the reputation of credibility that NYT has built throughout the years? And if so, is that enough to believe everything the NYT publishes or broadcasts? I think not. On the same grounds, why trust NYT more than Wikipedia as a news source, and so on?
- The “big whales make mistakes too” reality: Yes it’s a fact – very important news sources such as Britannica also have a certain percentage of errors in the content they offer and the studies they release to the public and since “no one is perfect”, Wikipedia included, that is absolutely natural.
To conclude, I believe in Wikipedia since it essentially gathers the knowledge and brain power of thousands, nay millions, of people out there into a collaborative space which could, in no way, be as biased or commercial as many other news sources. Therefore, in the debate of whether or not Wikipedia should be a source in Google News, I vote: “Yes”!
How about you, what’s your vote? Do you think Wikipedia is credible enough for Google News?
