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 Internetuser 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 onlineencyclopedia 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 anonline encyclopedia as, say, a single long-running television program. The traditional encyclopedia provides a considered view of what topics toinclude or exclude and contains a sense of proportion that online “democratic” communal encyclopedias do not.
My response:
The reading and the lecture discuss several points to compare communal online encyclopedias with the traditional, printed encyclopedias. The reading passage presents negative points about the online encyclopedias. However, the lecturer casts doubt on each of the points and states several advantages of the online encylopedias.
To begin with, the reading passage states that contributers of online encyclopedias often lack academic credential, therefore the informatoion in the online encyclopedias would be inaccurate. However, the lecturer points out that chances of making errors are impossible to avoid. Nobody can find or create a perfect article. Furthermore, the benefit of the online encyclopedias is that it is easy to correct errors online, but it can take decays to correct errors in the printed encyclopedias. This disputes the point made in the reading passage.
In addition, the reading passage states that the online encylopedias are easy to get corrupted by hackers. However, the lecturer sates that there are many protective ways to save the online encyclopedias from hackers. One of this way is the crucial fact about this encyclopedias. The crucial fact does not allow anyone to make any changes to the original formet. Moreover, the team of special editors always supervise the changes in the article, and if they find something malicious, they eliminate this king of changes. This directly challenges the assertion stated in the reading passage.
Last but not least, the reading passage states that online encyclopedias allow to put information in depth, which is the reason a reader lose interest in reading the aricle. However, the lecturer argues that this diversity in the aricle is the most important advantage of the online encyclopedias. This encyclopedias provide enough space to write all the information in detail about articles. This creates great variety and reflect diversity about articles. On the other hand, the tradition encyclopedias has limited space and only contain the information that a group of experts has decided. This information cannot reflect all the interests, a person can have. Thus, this appears to be a contradiction to the information asserted in the reading passage.
TOEFL listening discussions: A conversation between a professor and a departmental secretary