On 22/03/07, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
There seems to have developed a rather stock story about Wikipedia. You'd think these journalists would want to present something at least a little bit interesting, maybe unique, but they all seem to go back to the, "And then I put in false information! Look, even I could do it! Ha!" and end it there. I'm not sure if they are really all imbeciles, or if they just assume their audience is made up of imbeciles, but it is sad to say the least. When I wrote for the high school newspaper we had higher standards than that.
I shouldn't worry about it. As Richard Feynmann pointed out, all journalists are whores.
Basically what will happen is we'll have a spate of these kinds of stories, over the fact that there's this thing called the wikipedia and how you can..like.. edit it and stuff, and how risky that is. They'll do this until their audience starts to yawn
Then they'll spin it the other way, talk up how amazing the wikipedia is, and how its got this huge team of people constantly tidying up, how its in the top 10 webisites and how the EB isn't any better for being citeable either(!). They'll do that a few times until the audience starts to yawn...
Then they'll go back down on the wikipedia again, really stick the boot in. Then they probably won't mention it much more after that.
And it's all to sell advertising. That's all they do, and all they're there for at the end of the day.
FF