Week 1 - Collective Intelligence in Practice - Fatima Paulina López Díaz

 How Wikipedia has helped me improve my anthropological understanding of the world?


Throughout my three years studying Social Anthropology I've always heard the same old phrase from my Professors: No one knows more or the same than anyone, that's what makes knowledge precious. Of course, they were talking about the kind of information we get when we are doing fieldwork, but without knowing I've used it to understand everything around me.

When getting into this course I had a prejudice when it came to information I cannot attribute to one author. If no one is held accountable for a mistake in their own work then how can I be sure I can thrust the intentions behind its creation?

The few scientific articles I've written never contained any Wikipedia information because of it, but after learning all the policies and filters the platform has to make sure the articles are high quality my vision of it has changed. Without noticing before I was doing what my Professors always told me to never do: judge a source. Even when I cannot see the face of the source, or have a conversation with them there are still people behind every word we can read on Wikipedia, and just as I would do on fieldwork, I must thrust they are sharing their work and time with good intentions.

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