Steve Summit wrote:
Spotted by Lars Eighner on alt.usage.english:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/03/wikipedia_obituary_cut_and_paste/
(Summary: Ronnie Hazlehurst dies, obituarists copy false fact from his Wikipedia article.)
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 Cúchulainn 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.