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

[Nyenyec N]

On 11/20/05, Tom Cadden <thomcadden at yahoo.ie> wrote:
>  Another example: tonight I wrote an article on the Royal Assent in the Irish Free State. I know a lot about the topic and have read the major books on the crown and the Free State. Everything in there is verifiable and anyone who knows the facts will see it is 100% kosher. But how many others on WP would know about the topic? I could have sneaked in made-up facts and who would know? Who would know if an expert on science sneaked in dodgy facts into a highly technical article on biotechnology? Might it be weeks, or months before someone with similar knowledge came along, took one look and bellowed 'what the hell?? That is made-up rubbish.' In other words much of what we have on WP we have on trust. On popular pages on popular topics errors can be spotted quickly. But on obscure topics we have to trust that editors are not making up stuff. Or that they are not getting a fact wrong by accident: that a meeting took place on the 6th and not the 7th, that a book title had the word
>   'in'
>  not 'on', etc.

That's what I thought until I spotted a serious mistake in [[Adolf Hitler]].

http://tinyurl.com/bqa4z

-- nyenyec