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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".
"The poster child" in Paragraph 2 implies______.
选项 A、the typical model
B、the child portrait
C、the image spokesman
D、the representation of activity
答案A
解析 属词义题。此题探讨poster child在这句话里的含义。“poster child”的原意是“achild afflicted by some disease or deformity whose picture is used on posters to raise money for charitablepurposes”，即“出现在为慈善目的而募捐的海报上的生病或残疾孩童”。这里是比喻义，意思为“典型代表”。选项B的意思是“儿童肖像”；选项C的意思是“形象代言人”；选项D的意思是“活动的代表”。选项A的意思是“典型代表”，指只有10年历史的维基百科，故选项A为正确答案。
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