On 04/10/2007, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote:
I have replied to them with the following:
I write as a person who has participated in Wikipedia for more than five
years.
I'm glad that the article points the finger in the right place:
journalists who don't check their sources. Wikipedians themselves tell
school kids to seek independent support for what they use from
Wikipedia. Teachers who dwell upon Wikipedia's inaccuracies, often to
the extent of blocking its use entirely, miss an opportunity for
teaching kids to question anything that they read from whatever source.
That will be an absolutely vital lesson for children growing up in a
time when access to information is unbridled, and the most convincing
presentations are often from people with a vested interest.
Journalists should have learned better a long time ago. Wikipedia would
be very happy if those journalists notified Wikipedia to say that some
detail is mistaken; someone would investigate and most often the problem
would soon be solved. Instead they whine that Wikipedia is wrong,
rather than accepting their own responsibility in the matter.
Wikipedia's capacity for self-correction probably results in its being
more often correct than many, many other sources, either printed or
online. Those who view this as changing history also need to remember
that an archive of those changes remains fully available. If newspapers
publicly retract an error it cannot happen in the same issue as the
error; it will likely appear a few days later. Some years later, a
historian will look at the original article, and use it, completely
oblivious of the retraction. A readily linked archive of changes and
retractions reflects a much higher level of accountability.
Errors on Wikipedia will continue to arise with great regularity, and,
regrettably, many will not be found until there is another incident like
the present one. Unfortunately such an incident tends to magnify
inaccuracies out of proportion to their frequency. They take on the
inevitable nature of CĂșchulainn being served a meal of dog-meat.
Someone in the responses to the article quite fairly cited "It's
clearly not true, but it's now been in several reliable and verifiable
sources, and under Wikipedia rules it makes no difference whether it's
true or not" from the article's talk page. It's Wikipedia's paradox.
Without it the inaccuracies would be much worse, and Wikipedia would be
full of bizarre physics and urban legends. It seems that some
Wikipedian brains have the same gear shift as some journalist brains. A
good driver will know that his vehicle comes specially equipped with
gear positions for mountainous terrain. A poor driver will just damage
his own vehicle. Rules do that to us. Daleks and Vogons are very
certain of their mission in life; doubt is inimical to belief, even when
that belief is blatantly stupid. Reliable and verifiable sources become
virtual teddy-bears that we can hug when we want to go to sleep; they
will protect us from the ghosts of doubt.
Yes the journalists are most to blame here.
Unfortunately, Wikipedia is not completely off the hook. The incidence of
errors in the project, and ability of anyone to add anything (which will not
necessarily be picked up by others, despite what ultra-wiki-faith
evangelists would have you believe) *is* a major issue.
Look at it another way. People say, well, you shouldn't just rely on
Wikipedia if you are looking for a proper reference, go and find the source
material after looking at the Wikipedia article. So, even if we accept this
in the context of someone doing research, what about the casual browser?
They aren't going to go look up the sources. And yet even subconciously they
are going to remember anything non-controversial or plausible that they read
on Wikipedia as fact.
We really really need to take Wikipedia's spreading of disinformation very
seriously. One cannot get away with solely blaming those who source
information from Wikipedia.
At least, if we really want Wikipedia to be an encyclopaedia rather than a
factoid lucky-dip. Yes an encyclopaedia isn't a reliable first hand source
for research, but it should be generally quite accurate nevertheless. The
mistakes Britannica makes are actually worth the hoo-hah people make over
them. It's very bad for an information source, even an informal one not for
use in research, to have errors creeping into it. People read encyclopaedia
articles for facts, not "maybe facts - I guess I'll check each fact".
Zoney
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