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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".
It can be inferred from Paragraph 1 that______.
选项 A、Wikipedia is a secret and dirty website which few people know
B、people assume everything on Wikipedia can not be wrong
C、the public tend to question the authority of Wikipedia’s information
D、Wikipedia helps you improve your office skills
答案C
解析 属推断题。选项A断章取义，其表述本身就有错误，维基百科作为全球知名网站，网民基础深厚，故选项A错误。选项B是对原文观点的误解，原文列举了人们平时对维基百科的评价——“这一定是正确的，因为维基百科是这么说的”，这样的评价其实是反话，是具有讽刺意味的，讽刺维基百科的不准确性，故选项B错误。选项D捕风捉影，与原文关系不大，故选项D错误。根据原文列举人们对维基百科那句讽刺的评价可以推测人们经常怀疑维基百科的信息的准确性，故推测选项C符合题意。
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