"Robert Cohen" <robtcohen@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in
> As for the Rothschild's etal: I have not yet read the WIIKIPEDIA take;
Wiki-surfing is not research, children. For more on Wikipedia, see Daniel
Brandt's Wikipedia-watch at http://www.wikipedia-watch.org
See also, among numerous other stories in NY Transfer's archive:
"Wikipedia and Negotiable Reality" - Mar 18, 2006
http://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/Week-of-Mon-20060313/033810.html
"Congress Caught Making False Entries in Wikipedia" - Jan 31, 2006
http://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/Week-of-Mon-20060130/031451.html
"Science Journal Says Wikipedia Is 'Fairly' Accurate" - Dec 15, 2005
http://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/Week-of-Mon-20051212/028561.html
"Cuba and Crappy Wikipedia," - May 5, 2006
http://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/Week-of-Mon-20060501/037264.html
The Sunday Times (London) June 25, 2006
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,19510-2241865,00.html
Talking point: Wikipedia may be fallible, but we'd be crazy to stop
consulting it.
Wise words to gullible students
by Robbie Hudson
Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia anyone can edit. It contains
more than 4m entries, and you could add another one right now. Last
week, speaking at a conference in Pennsylvania, the site's
co-founder, Jimmy Wales, said he receives 10 e-mails a week from
college students complaining: "Please help me. I got an F on my
paper because I cited Wikipedia." His disarming response was: "For
God's sake, don't cite the encyclopedia."
This is the latest in a slew of stories about the website's
reliability, with fans and detractors baying at each other. Why
can't people get a grip?
I want to have no sympathy for these students, because anyone
quoting a website written by the public has no place in further
education, but some blame lies with Wales. The site's lofty
guidelines for contributors talk about neutrality and
fact-checking. Wikipedia has been puffed by respected journals such
as Nature, which, late in 2005, ran an irresponsible feature
implying that Wikipedia was nearly as reliable on scientific
matters as Encyclopaedia Britannica. Journalists leapt on this
because it was a great story.
Britannica's extensive rebuttal skewered the "careless" way Nature
had assembled its evidence - sending out partial entries, claiming
differences of opinion were errors, quoting from Britannica
publications other than the full encyclopedia - yet the rebuttal
prompted nowhere near the coverage of the original claim.
The Nature article came at a good time for Wikipedia, which was
under siege over a libellous fake biography that sat on the site
for four months last year before being discovered. John
Seigenthaler was Robert Kennedy's administrative assistant in the
early 1960s; the biography falsely claimed that he was thought to
be involved in both Kennedy assassinations. The libel, posted as a
prank, was not verified by the site's editors.
It is obvious that anyone can post anonymous defamation on the web.
Wikipedia gives them a forum within which they might be believed.
John Seigenthaler's case created a storm because Wikipedia calls
itself an encyclopedia, and ranks high in Google searches. This
gives it, says Daniel Brandt, a long-time critic who runs
http://www.wikipedia-watch.org,
"a massive, unearned influence on
what p***** for reliable information".
Seigenthaler said that "while Wikipedia may provide a great deal of
factual information, it also is a flawed and irresponsible research
tool". He also quoted a high-school teacher who told him:
"Wikipedia is intellectual democracy. My students love it. They can
contribute articles and it can give them quick facts."
As well as all the mistakes and pranks and frequent vandalism,
there have been well-publicised cases of politicians editing and
bowdlerising their entries. Well, durrr! Of course they do. I don't
want to vote for a politician too dim to be able to maintain a
flattering biography. Screaming about these "abuses" of Wikipedia
generates headlines, but it's shooting a whale in a barrel.
Wikipedia is a generally accurate first ****t of call for
information. It's especially good on tech subjects and pop culture,
and it's decent on most other topics. We'd be mad to trust it as a
definitive resource, but its unreliability is the price it pays for
grand ideals, which bring the benefit of a range and immediacy no
other enyclopedia can match.
The world is full of people who uncritically believe what they
read. I recently sat next to someone in a cinema who claimed that
The Da Vinci Code movie received bad reviews because "the Catholic
church controls the media". Online, fact and fiction look the same,
especially on a site such as Wikipedia, which has become an Aunt
Sally in the debate over dumbing down. This problem lies not with
Wikipedia, but our society's criminal lack of media literacy. We
are failing our children if they are so ignorant that they take
Wikipedia on trust.
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