G'day folks,
Government Computing News reports on a story of how an assistant professor posted incorrect information on Wikipedia to see how long it would take to get picked up. It is reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education. All the fabrications were picked up within three hours.
http://www.gcn.com/blogs/tech/42433.html
This week, *The Chronicle of Higher Education* reported on how an assistant professorhttp://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?%20id=z6xht2rj60kqmsl8tlq5ltqcshc5y93ydeliberately posted a number of errors in Wikipedia in order to see how long it would take for them to be noticed.
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"The fibs that professor Alexander Halavais slipped in were deviously subtle: that abolitionist Frederick Douglass, lived in Syracuse, N.Y. for four years, and that the Disney film *The Rescuers Down Under* won an Oscar for film editing. Both are false, but would you have doubted these "factoids"?
Halavais hypothesized that the obscure errors would "languish online for some time," the *Chronicle* reported. Instead the Wikipedia volunteers eliminated all the fabrications within three hours of being posted. And the volunteer checkers even admonished Halavais for making stuff up. We've written about both the potential powerhttp://www.gcn.com/print/25_25/41673-1.html?topic=technology_products%20wikisof and the uncertainties surrounding http://www.gcn.com/blogs/temin/41869.html group-led network projects before, but this Halavais' little experiment certainly does bode well for the form." Well done to those involved in correcting this misinformation.
Regards to all.
Keith Old