This is one of the reasons that at PES Network we aim to have a peer review article (not editable by community) for each of the major wiki articles.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/05/1339219
Wikipedia != Authoritative?
Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday September 05, @08:02AM from the well-duh-people dept. Frozen North writes "Recently, this article in the Syracuse Post-Standard caused a stir by dismissing Wikipedia as an authoritative source, and even suggesting that it was a little deceptive by looking too much like a "real" encyclopedia. Techdirt suggested an experiment: insert bogus information into Wikipedia, and see how long it takes for the mistake to be removed. Well, I did that experiment, and the results weren't good: five errors inserted over five days, all of which lasted until I removed them myself at the end of the experiment."
This bothers me a bit. First, the types of "errors" are not described at all. Does he really expect misspellings to be corrected quickly? Secondly, if he posted patent nonsense into Wikipedia, wouldn't you expect, at least fairly, a little while to go before it was noticed? After all Wikipedia is over 300,000 articles big. And he considers a test that lasted five days to be authorative? His method for testing is more opinion than science, and if science, at best junk science.
-ME
----- Original Message ----- From: Sterling D. Allan sterlingda@pureenergysystems.com To: MediaWiki egroup mediawiki-l@Wikimedia.org Sent: Sunday, September 05, 2004 8:31 PM Subject: [Mediawiki-l] (fyi) Wikipedia != Authoritative?
This is one of the reasons that at PES Network we aim to have a peer
review
article (not editable by community) for each of the major wiki articles.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/05/1339219
Wikipedia != Authoritative?
Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday September 05, @08:02AM from the well-duh-people dept. Frozen North writes "Recently, this article in the Syracuse Post-Standard caused a stir by dismissing Wikipedia as an authoritative source, and even suggesting that it was a little deceptive by looking too much like a
"real"
encyclopedia. Techdirt suggested an experiment: insert bogus information into Wikipedia, and see how long it takes for the mistake to be removed. Well, I did that experiment, and the results weren't good: five errors inserted over five days, all of which lasted until I removed them myself
at
the end of the experiment."
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