Activity #1 and #2

"Wikipedia is a multilingual, Web-based encyclopedia project, operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit organization." When anyone can edit a site, it is quite obvious that it may not be very reliable. Though, Wikipedia has a team of volunteers that keep an eye out for vandalism. These volunteers fix the wrong information.  When one hears the word "vandalism," they most likely think of spray-paint on city walls. Though this definition may be true, the vandalism on this site is simply wrong information on articles. Larry Sanger, one of Wikipedia's founders, left the site, believing that it should give more authority to experts. In my opinion, Wikipedia is doing just fine. In September, the English Wikipedia published their two millionth article. This site has articles written in more than 280 languages. This brings the total to over eight million articles in the site. Wikipedia is among the top 10 most visited encyclopedias on the Internet. The fact that Google searches usually list Wikipedia articles on result pages definitely helps out. All of this information shows that much of what people say about Wikipedia is false. According to these facts, it is a very reliable site. In my opinion, Wikipedia is successful because of Google. When it pops up on Google result pages, it becomes a very popular site; this not only goes for Wikipedia, but for many other sites as well. Wikipedia is quite widespread, though it does not accept advertising. Honestly, I have no idea why they do not want to advertise their site. Instead, the site uses only donations for funding. As I said earlier, a group of volunteers scan the site for vandalism; this makes Wikipedia a much more reliable source. Unfortunately, I have used Wikipedia few times. Many of my past teachers have opposed the site and  I only recently have discovered how reliable it truly is.

COHEN, NOAM. "Wikipedia." The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 19 Sept. 2012. <http://www.nytimes.com/learning/teachers/featured