On 21/08/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
The author of the article seems to forget that while you should take any source with a grain of salt, online ones in particular. Wikipedia has the advantage that it is subject to quality control (despite of what the author says) althought it's nearly impossible to keep an eye out on all entries. Wikipedia has the advantage of allowing the readers to track down the sources for any given entry. If there aren't any, you can contact the author and ask where they got it.
Of course in theory it works perfectly like that. However, if a "fact" was included in a version a year ago how easy is it to figure out who put it in to go and ask them for verification? There is no automatic mechanism for "blaming" any one user for any word in an article, which means it is a possible, but totally manual process.
Coming from a non-chalant user point of view though, they do not realise that they can track back through the history of the page to verify things themselves. The quality control you speak of is not perfect, the author of the article was not attempting to say there was no control, just that the control is susceptible to failure due to its passive nature.
Not everyone thinks like a seasoned Wikipedian!
Peter Ansell