[Wikipedia-l] Inquiry

[Ray Saintonge]

Lawrence Nyveen wrote:

> Reader's Digest (Canada) plans to reprint a version of this article: 
> http://legadoassociates.com/wikipedi.htm
>
> My job is to fact-check the article before it goes into the magazine, 
> and to do that, I would like to talk with some Wikipedia 
> contributors.  Anyone interested in helping me fact-check the article 
> should contact me through e-mail.  A lot of the article is not base so 
> much on strict facts but is rather the author's opinion on WIkipedia's 
> place in the encyclopedia ecosystem, yet I still have to check that.  
> I need to report to my editors whether the author has defensible ideas. 

I have two observations about the National Post article.  One thing that 
Quon does not mention about the Indian-Ocean-Tsunami article is how 
quickly it was put together.  I looked at it within a week of the event, 
and its writing was already substantially advanced.  This sort of 
writing carves out a niche that cannot easily be matched by the 
laborious editorial process of traditional encyclopaedias, the rushed 
publication deadlines of daily nespapers, or the throw-away impermanence 
of the weeklies.

More amusing was Quon's reference to the "article on U.S. president, 
Alexander Hamilton".  That "fact" did not come from Wikipedia, and 
McHenry did not fall into that hole.  Certainly we Canadians do a better 
job of reciting the list of U.S. presidents than the Americans do with 
the shorter list of Canadian prime ministers.  Still, the portrait on a 
$10.00 bill can be deceiving.  What's more important here is the simple 
process of falling into error.  It can happen anywhere, and to anybody.  
It can involve the most easily checkable of facts.  For Wikipedia that 
mental slip would be corrected very easily, but a newspaper would be 
loath to print a retraction over an historical person from two centuries 
ago.  A print encyclopaedia would be stuck with such a statement for a 
least a decade until a new edition be [sic!] published.  Good 
scholarship requires vigilance that does not yield to reliable sources.

Ec