[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia's provable anti-expertise bias

[Tom Cadden]

Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote: Puddl Duk wrote:

>>I just now returned from an 8 hour seminar wherein we were repeatedly
>>informed that free, non-governmental information on the internet is
>>dubious at best, and should be avoided for anything other than
>>commercial or general knowledge queries. Instead, the online
>>university  database was praised (it includes a subscription to
>>britannica, btw ;)
>>
>>Jack (Sam Spade
>>    
>>
>Get used to it. As long as we have no validation/review/vetting/rating
>mechanism we will always be in various stages of dubiousness.
>
Yes and no, but that's gradually being worked out.

But we are a long way off from adequate in terms of proper control of articles. I came across one edit that had been sitting in an article for a month. The article had been edited numerous times but no-one had spotted the clanger. I happen to know a bit about the topic and realised immediately it was a totally made up bit of vandalism.
 
 Among stuff surviving in articles which I came across lately were
 * a made up papal encyclical
 * a claim that Diana Princess of Wales believed that her husband was a shape-shifting lizard from outer space
 * a non-existing Irish government department
 
 How could any academic remind a site that allows stuff like that sit there, unchallenged in articles for long periods of time? I recently wrote an article for an Irish newspaper about a topic I had seen on Wikipedia. The article was fascinating but to be on the safe side I decided to double check it. 90% was A1. But there were 4 monster errors, all added in month ago but never checked. I hope that no kid in using that article for an essay quoted any of the errors. For every five good articles there is a dud in WP. And within each good article there seems to be dud facts. In a host of areas we are scarily far off encyclopædia standard. 


		
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