【综合】TPO 6综合作文~communal encyclopedia

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The lecturer who we hear in the listening material doesn't agree with the ideas that we read in the reading passage and raises her own perspectives on communal online encyclopedia.
Firstly, the reading passage says that online encyclopedias lack credentials because people writing it are not experts while traditional ones are edited by trained experts, which makes the contents more convincing. However, the lecturer points out that there are mistakes existing in traditional encyclopedia, but the difficulty to correct them makes it difficult, even take decades, before they are corrected. In contrast, the mistakes in online versions are much easier to be corrected. As a result, the communal encyclopedias may even be more accurate than printed version.
Secondly, according to the reading material, the communal nature of online encyclopedia makes it vulnerable to fabrications. While the lecturer points out that the crucial parts of the material are unavailable to be changed. In addition, she says that there are certain groups of people working on ensuring the safety of the information. So the statements in the listening material are not threats at all.
What's more, the professor doesn't agree with the common interest problem mentioned in the reading material, either. To support her position, she cites the fact that online encyclopedia can reflect the true interest of most people. And it makes an advantage of this kind of media.
To conclude, the lecturer we heard in the listening material agrees with none of the points made in the listening material, and cites convincing facts to support her position.



Reading passage:
　　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 nonspecialists 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.
　　Listening material:
　　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 decfsions 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 stiii 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
　　Question:Summarize the points made in the lecture.being sure to explain how they cast doubt on specific points made in the reading passage.