These past few weeks the world has been talking all about injustice and how it is damaging our communities. However, not many have talked about a justice system in this world that we meet everyday: the copyright system.
The copyright system allows you to copyright ideas for free and patent inventions with a fee. This system reminds us that it is important for us to acknowledge these authors for their hard work to uncover that information. But there is one place on the internet where things aren’t quite simple. That place is Wikipedia, the website notorious for being untrustworthy.
There are two main sides to this story: one that disproves the use of Wikipedia completely, and one that believes Wikipedia should be used especially in daily life. Most of us fall somewhere in the middle of this all, avoiding wikipedia in academic papers and then running to it for anything else.
But if you think about it, the only true reason we tend to not trust Wikipedia is because we don’t know who wrote and edited those articles and what their intentions are. We need to keep in mind that just because something isn’t the truth doesn’t mean it’s not worth reading.
If anything, Wikipedia forces us to think about what we are reading to figure out if that is logically true. If anything, we aren’t giving online collaborative forums like Wikipedia enough justice to let them do what they’re so good at: making us explore and think.
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