one of my favorite websites to use for both research and for fun is Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org). Wikipedia is a "free content encyclopedia" that not only offers fast, free information to all internet users, but it is also based on the basic democratic web principle of almost full access to all users (Wikipedia: About, 2001, www.wikipedia.org). The rest of this essay will explain to you why I think this is my favorite website by discussing its history, how it works, and what it has to offer.
Wikipedia, a part of Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., was founded January 2001 as a "wiki" by a group of people who were enthusiastic about placing a free encyclopedia in English on the internet. A "wiki" is a Hawaiian term meaning "quick" or "super-fast" that was used by Ward Cunningham to describe the first quick web database that offered all users access to editing content as well as free access to the information on the database. Generally, "wiki" refers to any database that uses a type of language that is easily edited and accessed by all users. Wikipedia became one of these databases and as of March 2004, 6000 people were working on 600,000 Wikipedia articles in more than 50 languages, half of those being in English (Wikipedia: About, 2001, www.wikipedia.org).
According to Wikipedia, it and other wiki-websites like it, allow documents to be written jointly in a simple markup language that readily interprets the values of the text without too much interpretation by the computer. This means that pages can be easily created and updated directly onto the website with no need for there to have the text interpreted into HTML, for example. So content can be constantly updated and expanded by any user who sees the need to do so (Wikipedia: About, 2001, www.wikipedia.org).
What this means to the regular user is that information is continually changing and being restructured so that, ideally, they are always going to get the most rece...