Since I could remember, all my teachers in elementary, middle, and high school have told me to never use Wikipedia. When I was younger, I questioned them and relied on Wikipedia anyways for information; still to this day I’ll use it when fact checking (but not for school papers, just my own personal use).
From what I know, anyone can edit and change information in a Wikipedia page. From the video shown, it is demonstrated that Wikipedia pages on constantly being edited. This is why teachers call it unreliable. BUT I also do know that Wikipedia has administrators/pending changing reviewers who review the changes made and will delete them if they are not true. To me, that seems like a tough job, considering how many edits are made and how many people are needed to fact check and change things. One thing I think that is important to mention is that Wikipedia is a non-profit organization. Every time you go on to look something up, they have a little advertisement stating that they believe information should be free and anyone can make changes and since they are a non-profit, they would like to receive donations to spruce up their website. So it makes sense why they let others make changes, but it hurts their reputation and credibility.
I also found it very interesting when Professor O’Malley said that design programs such as GIMP and Audacity were also products of crowd sourcing. The reason I say that is because I have used both of those programs and they are great for what they are and get the job done. Maybe not as easy as Adobe Photoshop or Garageband, but the fact they are free is the big difference. This motivated me to look into other forms of crowd sourcing.
Opinion seeking is a form and an example is SurveryMonkey.com and that is pretty self-explanatory. The one I really liked reading about was “content creation” which is what Audacity and GIMP would fall under. But it’s not related strictly to computer programs. The article uses an excellent example. Those Super Bowl commercials that are like “Send us a video and you could help us create our next commercial” is considered crowd sourcing and I thought that was pretty cool.
Overall, crowd sourcing is a cool way to get information from many different perspectives but it is not always the most reliable source and probably should not be used for formal or academic assignments.