On 10/4/07, Zoney zoney.ie@gmail.com wrote:
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.
Most agree it is a major issue, see the Wikimedia Quality site. (David linked to it.)
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.
We really really do take it seriously and are working on the issue, it is one of the board's goals or visions or something along those lines. ;-)
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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