Wikipedia Review

Wikipedia is the encyclopaedia that anyone can help to edit.

It can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

It is an information/educational website as its purpose it to provide high quality information on a wide range of topics. It is aimed at people from children to adult, although it is written in a pretty formal style.



The page has a typical article, as well as some up to date links. Along the top are some links for standard tasks like discussion (where people who have edited it discuss it); Edit the page and History, to show all of the changes. There is a standard menu on the left to move to important pages, including search. Each article has an introduction then the contents for the article; on the right is a block of summary information – each type of article (e.g. film) has the same kind of block. There are no options to change the appearance for accessibility, though you can go to a page which has lots of languages.

The main navigation is by searching, which normally searches in article title. This can bring up lots of answers. There are also many links in the article to other pages. However, when you start wikipedia, you don’t get a choice of categories to click down to find an article – you have to start by searching. You can get to these sorts of categories at the bottom of each page. There are lots of pages where you can have categories, but you come across them by accident. So you do get used to the standard page and having lots of links is useful.

The purpose of the site is to provide lots of information and it does seem to do this – in articles that I know things about, it does look accurate. However, it is possible that people can include things that are inaccurate, biased, misleading. You do need to know what you re looking for. There are lots of ‘disambiguation’ pages that help sort out articles with similar names.

To improve it, I would include the option to change the font size as it quite small. I would also have better category data.

Rating ****