The Great Gatsby Wikipedia Analysis

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The author Nicholson Baker wrote a passage about how wikipedia has come to what it is today. He starts out, in a very comical manner, about the main thing of wikipedia is to search and find definitions for any word, term, meaning, and so fourth of things that had been defined thus far on the newly developed website. Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia where any and everybody is the author. That was the main attraction at first for the website. If one has a very profound love for, as Baker mentions in his writing, “Diogenes of Sinope, Crazy Eddie, Bagoas, or the quadratic formula” (Baker 915) the joy of sharing your extended knowledge of what you now and love was more than just satisfying. He goes on to mention that people can were not considered …show more content…

However, Baker continues to use humor explaining how Wikipedia was almost wiped out. Since any and everyone can go into Wikipedia articles and edit them as they please, many people began to take a negative advantage of that.Internet trolls, which are people who like to upset people, by posting inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic things in an online community, often for their own amusement, came and attempted to bring Wikipedia down. He uses many examples of how people would go to an article about bedbugs, and delete everything and replace it with the troll talking about how bed bugs will get into one's butt. Or how an article how an article about aging gets replaced with “ Aging is what you get when you get fricken old old old” (Baker 918). The immaturity that the trolls brought to the online encyclopedia worried the creators that that was going to be the end. However, the exact opposite of what was expected happened. Instead of users leaving wikipedia, more came to protect it from the troll users. Mainly the editors of their original articles watched closely to make sure no trolls would harass their articles. If one did, they editor would quickly as they could change it back to what it was originally. The cat and mouse game attracted many more users, and making Wikipedia grow even more to this day, to become the most successful online

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