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  3. Wikipedia. To many it is still considered a dirty little secret. A site secretly consulted when an office conversation veers out

Wikipedia. To many it is still considered a dirty little secret. A site secretly consulted when an office conversation veers out

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问题     Wikipedia. To many it is still considered a dirty little secret. A site secretly consulted when an office conversation veers out of your comfort zone. When directly referenced, it is often accompanied by a hasty acknowledgement of its shortcomings. We are all familiar with the sarcastic undertones that lace the mantra "it must be right, because Wikipedia says so". But those undertones are slowly fading as the system improves and the site becomes less dirty, less little and less of a secret every day.
    Exactly 10 years after its launch and 17 million articles later, the poster child for collaboration is an accepted part of daily life in the developed world, with serious inroads being made to the rest of the world.
    The person tasked with steering Wikipedia’s growth is Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. A feisty former journalist and senior director of CBC.ca, Gardner was brought in to develop a clear strategy for the non-profit organisation in 2007. The main challenge was to ensure that the enormous, disparate community of contributors from around the world were aligned in a common cause. According to Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, hiring Gardner was "one of the best things we ever did".
    To many people, Wikipedia is a shining beacon of the original promise of the web. Gardner goes as far to say that it’s the "embodiment of the best aspects of the web".
    Where does it fall short? Gardner doesn’t hold back: "It’s a work in progress so we are always going to need to do better. All aspects need to be improved." As Wikipedia focuses on improving and expanding, the site is under constant fire from those who accuse it of being biased, unreliable and favouring of consensus over credentials in its editorial processes.
    Robert McHenry, author and former Editor-in-Chief of Encyclopedia Britannica, summarises what he describes as the "fatal fallacy" in the Wikipedia model:
    The fatal fallacy in the Wikipedia theory is that a Wikipedia article can be thought of as an "open source" project like those that produce software and that, like those, it will undergo steady improvement toward some ideal state. But the software is clearly identified as developmental while in this process, and it is constantly tested against objective criteria: it performs as intended, or it does not. The article is published to the world in whatever state it may be, changes for the better or for worse at random times, and is held to no standard that the user can rely upon.
    He certainly has a point—there are plenty of examples of false, and sometimes defamatory, information being posted to biographical profiles. There is also a systemic bias that often sees current events attract more attention than older ones and pop culture get a disproportionate amount of coverage, as well as perspective bias when reporting global events. That is not to say that traditional encyclopaedias are error-free. There have been a series of studies comparing the reliability of Wikipedia with traditional encyclopaedias, which have shown that Wikipedia’s reliability is improving. A study revealed that Wikipedia’s scientific articles came close to the level of accuracy in Encyclopaedia Britannica and had a similar rate of "serious errors".
On which of the following would the author most probably agree?
选项 A、Traditional encyclopedias are from mistakes and errors.
B、The article collected by Wikpedia bears much resemblance to the open-source software.
C、The promise of the web is about the democratization and freedom of access to information.
D、The risks of using Wikipedia overwhelms the minimal merits one can derive from it.
答案C
解析 属观点题。选项A是反向干扰，原文最后一段提到了即使是《不列颠百科全书》也会出错，故选项A错误。选项B同原文信息相悖，原文第七段提到了维基百科理论的致命错误在于它认为一篇维基百科的文章可以被当做一个“开源的”计划，故选项B错误。从全文来看，作者还是比较支持维基百科的，虽然维基百科有其致命弱点，但还是利大于弊，故选项D错误。维基百科就是信息民主化和信息获取自由化的典型代表，而作者在原文第四段又说道维基百科代表了互联网最初的承诺，故选项C符合题意。
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