Mohammed
EAP2# B
Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a large source of information you can find at one place in the Internet. Around 38 million people visited the English version of Wikipedia site in December 2006 ( Byers, 2007). Wikipedia consider the ninth most popular website in the United Sates. (Wolverton, 2007) the amazing thing is that you can use it free; however, it is not like an encyclopedia, because encyclopedia is more organize than Wikipedia. In this site, you can express every thing you want; many people visit Wikipedia to get some information, or just for fun. The people who write the Wikipedia not necessary to be professional; it is opens for any level of people. Therefore, there is no limit of age for people who write Wikipedia information. As Jason Wolverton (2007, para. 7) said,"Wikipedia articles can be written and edited by anyone at anytime”

Some people do not like Wikipedia because it might contain wrong information, any body can add any information to your article, and it might change some of the audience ideas. So, “the argument amongst scholars is that the information available on Wikipedia is not necessary accurate and that the articles themselves are particularly susceptible to internet vandalism” (Wolverton, 2007, para 11). Therefore, they cannot determine the truth; because of that, many universities banned using Wikipedia as resource especially in the history papers and exam. (Byers, 2007) Moreover, it allows others to argue without knowledge, or comment on bad words of some articles or writers.

The good thing about Wikipedia is the possibility of it’s guiding you to some good resources, or if you want to write something and you do not find the subject, you can get it from Wikipedia. In addition, some people could use it to find arguments regarding some problems."This website has grown into an immensely useful resource for background information on a wide range of scientific subject, and can serve as a quick reference for any number of scientific facts” (Parry, 2008, para 6). We can use Wikipedia or Google search or any similar resources to learn those students how to guess the authority of information sources, we need them to be independent when they get their information from mysterious sources.( Bilodeau, 2008)
.For me, I used it for three reasons,to find new articles,for good arguments,and for fun.