Tom Cadden thomcadden@yahoo.ie wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote: Puddl Duk wrote:
I just now returned from an 8 hour seminar wherein we were repeatedly informed that free, non-governmental information on the internet is dubious at best, and should be avoided for anything other than commercial or general knowledge queries. Instead, the online university database was praised (it includes a subscription to britannica, btw ;)
Jack (Sam Spade
Get used to it. As long as we have no validation/review/vetting/rating mechanism we will always be in various stages of dubiousness.
Yes and no, but that's gradually being worked out.
But we are a long way off from adequate in terms of proper control of articles. I came across one edit that had been sitting in an article for a month. The article had been edited numerous times but no-one had spotted the clanger. I happen to know a bit about the topic and realised immediately it was a totally made up bit of vandalism.
Among stuff surviving in articles which I came across lately were * a made up papal encyclical * a claim that Diana Princess of Wales believed that her husband was a shape-shifting lizard from outer space * a non-existing Irish government department
How could any academic remind a site that allows stuff like that sit there, unchallenged in articles for long periods of time? I recently wrote an article for an Irish newspaper about a topic I had seen on Wikipedia. The article was fascinating but to be on the safe side I decided to double check it. 90% was A1. But there were 4 monster errors, all added in month ago but never checked. I hope that no kid in using that article for an essay quoted any of the errors. For every five good articles there is a dud in WP. And within each good article there seems to be dud facts. In a host of areas we are scarily far off encyclopædia standard.
Another example: tonight I wrote an article on the Royal Assent in the Irish Free State. I know a lot about the topic and have read the major books on the crown and the Free State. Everything in there is verifiable and anyone who knows the facts will see it is 100% kosher. But how many others on WP would know about the topic? I could have sneaked in made-up facts and who would know? Who would know if an expert on science sneaked in dodgy facts into a highly technical article on biotechnology? Might it be weeks, or months before someone with similar knowledge came along, took one look and bellowed 'what the hell?? That is made-up rubbish.' In other words much of what we have on WP we have on trust. On popular pages on popular topics errors can be spotted quickly. But on obscure topics we have to trust that editors are not making up stuff. Or that they are not getting a fact wrong by accident: that a meeting took place on the 6th and not the 7th, that a book title had the word 'in' not 'on', etc.
That is Wikipedia's greatest weakness. I don't know if I read a science article whether it is true or false. At least on Brittanica I know it has been thoroughly vetted. But I can't be sure that the same article on WP was. So how do I know it really is trustworthy?
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