Communal online encyclopedias represent one of the latest resources to be found on the Internet. They are in many respects like traditional printed encyclopedias collections of articles on various subjects. What is specific to these online encyclopedias,

Essay topics:

Communal online encyclopedias represent one of the latest resources to be found on the Internet. They are in many respects like traditional printed encyclopedias collections of articles on various subjects. What is specific to these online encyclopedias, however, is that any Internet user can contribute a new article or make an editorial change in an existing one. As a result, the encyclopedia is authored by the whole community of Internet users. The idea might sound attractive, but the communal online encyclopedias have several important problems that make them much less valuable than traditional, printed encyclopedias.
First, contributors to a communal online encyclopedia often lack academic credentials, thereby making their contributions partially informed at best and downright inaccurate in many cases. Traditional encyclopedias are written by trained experts who adhere to standards of academic rigor that non-specialists cannot really achieve.
Second, even if the original entry in the online encyclopedia is correct, the communal nature of these online encyclopedias gives unscrupulous users and vandals or hackers the opportunity to fabricate, delete, and corrupt information in the encyclopedia. Once changes have been made to the original text, an unsuspecting user cannot tell the entry has been tampered with. None of this is possible with a traditional encyclopedia.
Third, the communal encyclopedias focus too frequently, and in too great a depth, on trivial and popular topics, which creates a false impression of what is important and what is not. A child doing research for a school project may discover that a major historical event receives as much attention in an online encyclopedia as, say, a single long-running television program. The traditional encyclopedia provides a considered view of what topics to include or exclude and contains a sense of proportion that online "democratic" communal encyclopedias do not.

Lecture notes
Professor:
The communal online encyclopedia will probably never be perfect, but that's a small price to pay for what it does offer. The criticisms in the reading are largely the result of prejudice against and ignorance about how far online encyclopedias have come.
First, errors. It's hardly a fair criticism that encyclopedias online have errors. Traditional encyclopedias have never been close to perfectly accurate, if you are looking for a realty comprehensive reference work without any mistakes, you are not going to find it, on or off line. The real point is that it's easy for errors in factual material to be corrected in an online encyclopedia. But with the printed and bound encyclopedia, the errors remain for decades.
Second, hacking. Online encyclopedias have recognized the importance of protecting their articles from malicious hackers. One strategy they started using is to put the crucial facts in the articles that nobody disputes in a read-only format, which is a format that no one can make changes to. That way you are making sure that the crucial facts in the articles are reliable. Another strategy that's being used is to have special editors whose job is to monitor all changes made to the articles and eliminate those changes that are clearly malicious.
Third, what's worth knowing about? The problem for traditional encyclopedias is that they have limited space, so they have to decide what's important and what's not. And in practice, the judgments of the group of academics that make these decisions don't reflect the great range of interests that people really have. But space is definitely not an issue for online encyclopedias. The academic articles are still represented in online encyclopedias, but there can be a great variety of articles and topics that accurately reflect the great diversity of users' interests. The diversity of use in topics that online encyclopedias offer is one of their strongest advantages.

The reading and the lecture are about communal online encyclopedias, which are unique because they can be revised and edited by anyone in the world. The author of the reading argues that they are less reliable than traditional printed encyclopedias. The professor casts doubt on each of the criticisms made by the author.

To begin with, the author notes that such encyclopedias are edited by individuals without academic credentials. He feels that this means their contributions are sometimes inaccurate or ill-informed. The professor challenges this point. He asserts that even traditional encyclopedias are not perfectly accurate. Moreover, he says that when errors creep into printed books, they remain there for years, unlike in online sources where they can be quickly corrected.

Secondly, the author claims that vandals and hackers have opportunities to include false information in online encyclopedias, or to corrupt and vandalize correct information. He feels that unsuspecting users have no way of detecting when this has occurred. The professor casts doubt on these claims. He draws attention to the fact that the administrators of online encyclopedias have methods of protecting their content. He says that they have special editors who watch all changes and revert those which are obviously malicious.

Finally, the author points out that communal reference works tend to focus on topics which are trivial or unimportant. This can create a false impression of which topics are important and which are not. The lecturer, in contrast, says that because online encyclopedias have unlimited space they are free to cover a wide variety of topics. He argues that just because a considerable number of articles are written about popular topics, we should not assume that academic topics are not being represented.

Votes
Average: 8.5 (1 vote)
Essay Categories

Comments

Grammar and spelling errors:
Line 1, column 251, Rule ID: ENGLISH_WORD_REPEAT_BEGINNING_RULE
Message: Three successive sentences begin with the same word. Reword the sentence or use a thesaurus to find a synonym.
...than traditional printed encyclopedias. The professor casts doubt on each of the cr...
^^^

Transition Words or Phrases used:
but, finally, moreover, second, secondly, so, in contrast, to begin with

Attributes: Values AverageValues Percentages(Values/AverageValues)% => Comments

Performance on Part of Speech:
To be verbs : 16.0 10.4613686534 153% => OK
Auxiliary verbs: 4.0 5.04856512141 79% => OK
Conjunction : 9.0 7.30242825607 123% => OK
Relative clauses : 22.0 12.0772626932 182% => OK
Pronoun: 35.0 22.412803532 156% => Less pronouns wanted
Preposition: 30.0 30.3222958057 99% => OK
Nominalization: 4.0 5.01324503311 80% => OK

Performance on vocabulary words:
No of characters: 1551.0 1373.03311258 113% => OK
No of words: 284.0 270.72406181 105% => OK
Chars per words: 5.46126760563 5.08290768461 107% => OK
Fourth root words length: 4.10515524023 4.04702891845 101% => OK
Word Length SD: 2.95174399308 2.5805825403 114% => OK
Unique words: 157.0 145.348785872 108% => OK
Unique words percentage: 0.552816901408 0.540411800872 102% => OK
syllable_count: 485.1 419.366225166 116% => OK
avg_syllables_per_word: 1.7 1.55342163355 109% => OK

A sentence (or a clause, phrase) starts by:
Pronoun: 10.0 3.25607064018 307% => Less pronouns wanted as sentence beginning.
Article: 9.0 8.23620309051 109% => OK
Subordination: 0.0 1.25165562914 0% => More adverbial clause wanted.
Conjunction: 1.0 1.51434878587 66% => OK
Preposition: 2.0 2.5761589404 78% => OK

Performance on sentences:
How many sentences: 17.0 13.0662251656 130% => OK
Sentence length: 16.0 21.2450331126 75% => The Avg. Sentence Length is relatively short.
Sentence length SD: 38.9735958884 49.2860985944 79% => OK
Chars per sentence: 91.2352941176 110.228320801 83% => OK
Words per sentence: 16.7058823529 21.698381199 77% => OK
Discourse Markers: 4.23529411765 7.06452816374 60% => More transition words/phrases wanted.
Paragraphs: 4.0 4.09492273731 98% => OK
Language errors: 1.0 4.19205298013 24% => OK
Sentences with positive sentiment : 6.0 4.33554083885 138% => OK
Sentences with negative sentiment : 7.0 4.45695364238 157% => OK
Sentences with neutral sentiment: 4.0 4.27373068433 94% => OK
What are sentences with positive/Negative/neutral sentiment?

Coherence and Cohesion:
Essay topic to essay body coherence: 0.204559785439 0.272083759551 75% => OK
Sentence topic coherence: 0.0629499296816 0.0996497079465 63% => OK
Sentence topic coherence SD: 0.0565881187668 0.0662205650399 85% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence: 0.130611810115 0.162205337803 81% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence SD: 0.0300341565475 0.0443174109184 68% => OK

Essay readability:
automated_readability_index: 12.6 13.3589403974 94% => Automated_readability_index is low.
flesch_reading_ease: 46.78 53.8541721854 87% => OK
smog_index: 8.8 5.55761589404 158% => OK
flesch_kincaid_grade: 10.7 11.0289183223 97% => OK
coleman_liau_index: 14.09 12.2367328918 115% => OK
dale_chall_readability_score: 8.49 8.42419426049 101% => OK
difficult_words: 73.0 63.6247240618 115% => OK
linsear_write_formula: 6.5 10.7273730684 61% => OK
gunning_fog: 8.4 10.498013245 80% => OK
text_standard: 9.0 11.2008830022 80% => OK
What are above readability scores?

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Rates: 85.0 out of 100
Scores by essay e-grader: 25.5 Out of 30
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Note: the e-grader does NOT examine the meaning of words and ideas. VIP users will receive further evaluations by advanced module of e-grader and human graders.