Reading Report #2

The preconceived notion I had of Wikipedia before reading this article was that it was a website which could not be depended upon to supply people with accurate information. I can recall many of my college professors having informed the class not to use Wikipedia as a source when writing research papers, as people everywhere are able to post information and data that may perhaps be fabricated or completely false. Although I am familiar with this online encyclopedia, I never thought of it as something that would all of a sudden stop growing since new people are always accessing the website and wanting to add specific facts to help inform the world, also giving them a special sense of accomplishment. Almost every time I enter a subject into the search engine, Wikipedia is usually the first link that appears under results, making it seem hard to believe that such a large online encyclopedia such as this one, covering such a wide variety of topics, could one day cease to exist.
Although I was previously aware of the fact that this encyclopedia was constantly edited and changed by its users, I had no idea that as many as 2,200 articles were added daily and 820,000 people contributed information to Wikipedia in just one month. I knew Wikipedia was a popular and commonly accessed site but I did not think that many people would volunteer their time to share their knowledge with the world. I was shocked to learn how drastically the encyclopedia changed in only two years, as it no longer grew in exponential amounts when it reached 2009. It is difficult to tell exactly why this has happened but it could very well be attributed to the fact that people no longer trusted what was written on this encyclopedia. With 820,000 people adding information to this online encyclopedia in just one month, it makes sense that it may have stopped growing because people ran out of information to add that was not already included in the articles.