Websites

Websites

Today , the World Wide Web has become an indispensable tool for the citizen for the 21st century . From connecting with lost friends through myspace or friendster , to communicating with colleagues through email to looking up stock quotes in Yahoo ! finance to planning a route for the next family vacation the web has become a pervasive element of modern living . All of this started in 1990 with a physicist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research , more commonly known as CERN . A physicist at CERN named Tim Berners-Lee thought of a way

to share information between his colleagues using the system of hypertext - the all too familiar method of clicking on links to navigate through information . This gave birth to the World Wide Web project , with the world 's first website located at http /info .cern .ch /hypertext /WWW /TheProject .html . From this very first website hosted on the very first web server , the rest as they say is history

Originally , the web was borne as a way to share and gleam new information . Nearly two decades later , the web is still a practical source of information , a resource that is indispensable to people from high school students to particle physicists . From the tour dates of your favorite band to the migration patterns of African people nearly every useable piece of information could be found online . However one website has the possibility to change the way that the web contains information Wikipedia , the free encyclopedia was launched on January 15 , 2001 . What is unique about Wikipedia is the absolute democracy of information I presents . Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that anybody can contribute to regardless of credentials or technical know-how . This has allowed an unprecedented number of people to pour their collective knowledge into the many wikis of Wikipedia . Today , the English version of Wikipedia has more than 1 .8 million articles from Shakespeare to sandwiches with other Wikipedias in other languages following suit

While Wikipedia may have allowed a global outpouring of knowledge in a massive scale , its strength is also its main weakness . Since anybody can edit Wikipedia , there is for the most part no guarantee to the accuracy of the information in the encyclopedia . Moreover , Wikipedia could is also the only encyclopedia exposed to attacks of vandalism . Lastly because of the democratic nature of Wikipedia , the academic rigors of traditional encyclopedias give way to the popular and the extravagant Chinua Achebe 's famed 1958 novel Things Fall Apart is covered only by 3 chapters in its Wikipedia page . Compare this to the nine chapters Wikipedians ' dedicated to Paris Hilton , with one entire sub chapter dedicated to her infamous sex video . In spite of this limitation , we could simply view Wikipedia as a reflection of Society , the sum our intellectual prowess or simply as the combined efforts of people with too much free time on their hands

While information is indeed a great way for the web to aid our daily lives , all this information would be useless if...