G'day folks,
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Radio National has posted audio and a podcast of Jimmy Wales speaking on 21 March.
http://abc.net.au/rn/australiatalks/stories/2007/1876878.htm
Crikey advises us that one of the callers Peter from Melbourne was former Anglican Archbishop and Governor-General of Australia. I understand that Hollingworth didn't advise of who he was. Unfortunately, you are required to pay a fee to access it.
Our article on Hollingworth gives some idea of the exchange.
*I have a particular question and I am very glad that Jimmy Wales is there. It is related to the biographical entries – I would just be interested to know how all of those things are managed because to speak personally on it. I found an entry on me at one stage which I found offensive and inaccurate and it had been put on there by someone I had never heard of and I purely by accident found it when someone else told me that I should check it out. Now I fully support the whole idea of the democratisation of knowledge that's the best thing we can do for everybody – but there is still – is the question how you balance this out with truth and accuracy. Now in this particular case I think the problem arose because the person who put the entry in simply took the information from various newspapers who had got it wrong in the first place so you have one falsehood being reinforced by another and another – and I am just wondering and a question to Jimmy Wales is – do you have any responsibility for that and what would you do for example if somebody decided to sue you for libel?* ** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Hollingworth ** The presenter, Paul Barclayhttp://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Paul_Barclay&action=edit, challenged the caller on whether he was Hollingworth. Hollingworth admitted he was. Wales indicated that Wikipedia had never been sued and that it was very careful to ensure that all biographies of living people were accurate.
Regards
*Keith Old*
On 26/03/07, Keith Old keithold@gmail.com wrote:
Now in this particular case I think the problem arose because the person who put the entry in simply took the information from various newspapers who had got it wrong in the first place so you have one falsehood being reinforced by another and another –
But that's IMPOSSIBLE because newspapers are RELIABLE SOURCES. Or so I'm told.
- d.
On Mar 26, 2007, at 2:03 AM, David Gerard wrote:
But that's IMPOSSIBLE because newspapers are RELIABLE SOURCES. Or so I'm told.
Yeah, right....
Go and try now and make a change to RS in which you say "take newspaper articles with a pinch of salt, and be sure to confirm that source with other sources so as not to republish their mistakes in Wikipedia".
You will be slaughtered there...
-- Jossi
But that's IMPOSSIBLE because newspapers are RELIABLE SOURCES. Or so I'm told.
"Reliable" does not mean "right". It means "right often enough for it to be worth us trusting them". It's pretty much impossible to find a source you can be 100% sure is right (the only exception I can think of is a primary source for facts like "So-and-so claims such-and-such", and even then there is a chance the source is a fake). There is no way we can personally check every fact we mention, so we have to trust external sources to be correct. If they turn out not to be, we obviously need to correct the article, but other than that, there's nothing we can do.