Wikipedia Releases New Tools That Betters The Internet
You want to look up a historical figure. Of course, you can just go up to google and search for the name, but no. You head up to Wikipedia and take down everything that you can get from there. Why do you do that? Turns out that Wikipedia is a treasure house of information. If you need to know about something, Wikipedia has it. But now the website is going beyond just knowledge. Wikipedia has saved up a ton of websites.
The web is an ever moving place. Thousands of sites die and born every single day. Some useful, some not. But with the help of the Internet Archive project, Wikipedia was able to solve the problem of web pages getting lost in the wormhole of the internet. But, why? Why would Wikipedia do that? Well, the knowledge database wants to build another huge, massive knowledge base.
Better Internet
The man behind this project is Maximilian Doerr. He is the guy behind the program called the Internet Archive Bot, a program that aims at identifying broken links. What are broken links? Well, these are links that lead you to the “404 error” or “page not found” sites.
This program unearths these broken links and attaches it to the corresponding pages. This way, the content is preserved even if the original page is no longer available. And the software has been doing a pretty good job! Over the past 6 years, this little software has been able to recover over 6 million links. Volunteers also pooled in to help restore these links manually. 3 million additional links have also been attached by finding the right page and creating a gateway.
Better Tools
But this is not the only good news. Wikipedia has undertaken a project that will simplify its interface and add more tools and upgrades that eventually is for the good of the web. Wikipedia has also upgraded the desktop version of the site by offering a page review by just rolling the mouse over to view the needed page.
These updates and tools are vital, as the internet continues to be the main system of preserving knowledge and memories. Books and pens have come to be things of the past, and the internet has slowly emerged to be the tool that we would use to pass on knowledge to the next generations.
This is also a good news for Wikipedia as this will help strengthen the credibility of the website as a whole. For students and researchers who tend to use the service as daily bread, this is noteworthy, and we can be sure that from now on Wikipedia will turn out to be one of the most trusted and used sites on the internet.
