Assignment 9

The main similarities between the two websites are their encyclopedia like design and the ability of users to edit content. That is where the similarities end though. The difference are profound. Where wikpedia is composed by anyone, scholarpedia is composed of authors and professionals only. When editing, wikipedia authors have little control over it. Scholarpedia though the author must approve all edits. Also user interface was much better on wikipedia. Articles are simple to find which was unlike scholarpedia where article searching was a pain, I could not even find a good article on basic scientific concept like evolution. Wikipedia barely contains redirects to other sites while scholarpedia contained frequent links to Amazon.com, almost to the point where I question if it was just created by Amazon for advertising. Another difference is that most articles were full text on wikipedia and were exactly on topic while many articles on scholarpedia where just a sample of the text or search engine results that many times linked to the authors products. Finally the variety of articles on wikipedia have a mixture of scholarly and common interest while schlorpedia is what I consider just a very small fraction of scholarly information. As for use, I have used wikipedia many times trying to get background information on subjects or when I was just surfing the web. As for scholarpedia I used for the first time today and plan to never use it again due to the lack of information and its horrible user interface.

There are several concepts I find interesting. The first one is that wiki allows anyone to edit or contribute to a web page. The second concept is that answers/solutions have the opportunity to be easily created by a collaboration of professional ideas instead of each individually, which could have biases and errors.

I think based on the ease of misinformation that can be created on a wiki, its use for research should be limited to basic background research and should never be actually used to write a paper. As for projects, I think it could be used to organize and construct projects when parties involved have trouble meeting face to face.