On 15 January 2025, Wikipedia turned 24 years old and I gave a small interview to the Mauritius Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) to explain how Wikipedia works and how it is still very valuable in our era of ChatGPT, especially for young people. The interview was shown during the 19:30 news broadcast on 22 January.
Wikipedia has become the largest collection of user-contributed and user-corrected content on the planet. Today, it has more than 6 million articles in English (and large amounts in other languages too) and is easily one of the most visited websites.
I spoke about how I discovered Wikipedia in 2005 and, since then, have made about 250 corrections. Millions of people contribute in the same way for different kinds of articles and this is why I really believe that Wikipedia is the best online resource for multidisciplinary people like me. I would really love to have more polymaths in Mauritius and I believe that Wikipedia can help us do this.
Wikipedia, as the largest and most interesting encyclopedia on the planet, can be very valuable in class too. For example, General Paper teachers could use its “random article” feature to explore interesting topics with their students. This is true for any kind of class though: it is just a question of devoting, say, one hour every week to have fun by exploring things which, ahem, are not necessarily in the syllabus.
Leave a Reply