On Tuesday May 20, 2008, page 4 of Dagens Nyheter, Sweden's
leading newspaper, carried a signed editorial article by Henrik
Berggren, detailing how he found an error in the Swedish language
Wikipedia and corrected it,
http://www.dn.se/DNet/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=577&a=771422
This [[:sv:Henrik Berggren (journalist)]] has a Wikipedia entry
since 2005. He holds a PhD degree in history.
The error is rather serious, a whole paragraph of text claims that
[[Fredrika Bremer]] (Swedish writer, feminist pioneer, 1801-1865)
found the love of her life in 1820 and married later that decade.
In reality, she never married. The error was planted on May 4,
2007 by the username Elinwolf and corrected by Henrik berggren
more than a year later. Apparently, the error never spread to
other languages.
The editorial article, however, doesn't ridicule Wikipedia as an
unreliable source of information. It concludes that this is what
might happen unless we are vigilant, and that Wikipedia's quality
depends on all of us, especially when it comes to more obscure
topics than the most renowned authors.
This follows after the newspaper reprinted AFP's story on May 11
about professor Jon Beasley-Murray at the University of British
Columbia, with the puzzle globe and the headline "gains respect"
on the front webpage (
www.dn.se) for several days, and after a
similar story from a Swedish college was featured on May 19,
http://www.dn.se/DNet/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=147&a=771168
In summary, Swedish press reporting about Wikipedia is currently
very positive and also quite realistic. Wikipedia is described as
something that school children actually use as a reference and
something we all can and should contribute to, but not as a pile
of junk and neither as a promised land. There has also been one
mention of how the Russian Wikipedia gained the 10th position.
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik -
http://aronsson.se