http://www.uscfc.uscourts.gov/Opinions/Allegra/06/ALLEGRA.Campbell.pdf
The articles that the Special Master culled from the Internet do not – at least on their face remotely meet this reliability requirement. Consider the item on "febrile seizures" that she added from the Dictionary of Neurology, www.explore-medicine.com. Although that website no longer exists, the exhibit introduced by the Special Master indicates that its information was drawn from Wikipedia.com, a website that allows virtually anyone to upload an article into what is essentially a free, online encyclopedia. A review of the Wikipedia website reveals a pervasive and, for our purposes, disturbing series of disclaimers, among them, that: (i) any given Wikipedia article "may be, at any given moment, in a bad state: for example it could be in the middle of a large edit or it could have been recently vandalized;" (ii) Wikipedia articles are "also subject to remarkable oversights and omissions;" (iii) "Wikipedia articles (or series of related articles) are liable to be incomplete in ways that would be less usual in a more tightly controlled reference work;" (iv) "[a]nother problem with a lot of content on Wikipedia is that many contributors do not cite their sources, something that makes it hard for the reader to judge the credibility of what is written;" and (v) "many articles commence their lives as partisan drafts" and may be "caught up in a heavily unbalanced viewpoint."
Interesting. In this case, apparently, a Special Master, appointed by the court under the Vaccine Act, introduced items from the internet, including one which originated as a Wikipedia article. On the evidence in those unverified documents, she dismissed a case for damages because evidence could not be presented to demonstrate that the nature of the child's seizures following vaccination was as described in the internet documents. There was no evidentiary hearing and so neither party had the opportunity to challenge that internet evidence introduced by the Special Master.
The federal court, naturally, was not impressed.
On 4/21/06, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
Interesting. In this case, apparently, a Special Master, appointed by the court under the Vaccine Act, introduced items from the internet, including one which originated as a Wikipedia article. On the evidence in those unverified documents, she dismissed a case for damages because evidence could not be presented to demonstrate that the nature of the child's seizures following vaccination was as described in the internet documents. There was no evidentiary hearing and so neither party had the opportunity to challenge that internet evidence introduced by the Special Master.
The federal court, naturally, was not impressed.
Wow. That's disturbing. There are times when the influence of Wikipedia makes me distinctly uncomfortable...if I make a mistake in what I write, if I screw something up, I have changed "knowledge". Yet again, I wish that the world understood that Wikipedia is a beta.
On 4/21/06, Guettarda guettarda@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/21/06, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
Interesting. In this case, apparently, a Special Master, appointed by the court under the Vaccine Act, introduced items from the internet, including one which originated as a Wikipedia article. On the evidence in those unverified documents, she dismissed a case for damages because evidence could not be presented to demonstrate that the nature of the child's seizures following vaccination was as described in the internet documents. There was no evidentiary hearing and so neither party had the opportunity to challenge that internet evidence introduced by the Special Master.
The federal court, naturally, was not impressed.
Wow. That's disturbing. There are times when the influence of Wikipedia makes me distinctly uncomfortable...if I make a mistake in what I write, if I screw something up, I have changed "knowledge". Yet again, I wish that the world understood that Wikipedia is a beta.
Particularly if you consider that most of our vaccine articles are at best undergoing the wikipedia equiverlent of a mexican standoff.
-- geni
On Fri, 21 Apr 2006 13:21:52 +0100, you wrote:
Particularly if you consider that most of our vaccine articles are at best undergoing the wikipedia equiverlent of a mexican standoff.
Ain't that the truth. There is an RfC on [[User:Whaleto]] at present which is just one small part of that. Guy (JzG)
On 21/04/06, Guettarda guettarda@gmail.com wrote:
Wow. That's disturbing. There are times when the influence of Wikipedia makes me distinctly uncomfortable...if I make a mistake in what I write, if I screw something up, I have changed "knowledge". Yet again, I wish that the world understood that Wikipedia is a beta.
I think of Wikipedia more like "my first encyclopaedia" than "beta" as such. Sometimes beta software is pretty good. You can use beta software to run your business. I don't think any serious professional or academic would be trusting their reputation on "my first encyclopaedia".
Steve
Steve Bennett wrote:
On 21/04/06, Guettarda guettarda@gmail.com wrote:
Wow. That's disturbing. There are times when the influence of Wikipedia makes me distinctly uncomfortable...if I make a mistake in what I write, if I screw something up, I have changed "knowledge". Yet again, I wish that the world understood that Wikipedia is a beta.
I think of Wikipedia more like "my first encyclopaedia" than "beta" as such. Sometimes beta software is pretty good. You can use beta software to run your business. I don't think any serious professional or academic would be trusting their reputation on "my first encyclopaedia".
I know plenty of academics who use Wikipedia on a regular basis to do real work (some of them due to my evangelizing), and am one myself.
As with any source, a grain of salt is always necessary, and if the information is particularly important it should be verified from multiple sources. But in general Wikipedia articles in areas I'm interested in (the sciences, math, and computer science) are about as accurate as traditional encyclopedia articles (_Science_'s Wikipedia versus Britannica survey agrees). Of course, coverage of science in traditional encyclopedias is far from perfect, so improvement is always possible and to be desired. Some of that can already be done on the reader's end---After using it for a bit you get a feel for how much to trust a particular article, based on how frequently edited it is, how controversial the topic is, and whether it "sounds right" (many biased articles *sound* like they're pushing a point of view).
As a general reference, I think it's at least beta, though. I use it as part of serious academic work, and I know others who do as well. We don't *cite* it, or rely exclusively on it, but we don't do that with textbooks or Britannica, either. There are certainly huge gaping holes in coverage, and some pretty bad articles, but in general it's useful as a reference, and I usually turn first to Wikipedia when I want to look something up.
-Mark