[WikiEN-l] Fwd: Article and info for Interview on The Right Hook

[Steve Bennett]

On 8/22/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm doing an interview about this on [[Newstalk 106]] at 6pm. I've
> attached the original article they're talking about (it's not on the site).
>
> I find it hard to argue the unreliability point as stated ... I
> suspect I'll be emphasising the 'perpetual working draft' angle and
> [[Portal:Ireland]]. Probably http://ga.wikipedia.org as well. Any
> other ideas, anyone?

I find it very frustrating that they don't attempt to quantify any of
these errors by the time they existed, nor quantify the total number
of blatant errors at any given time. They treat the Seigenthaler
incident (a serious, fairly nasty accusation that lasted *4 months*)
in the same way as joke contributions to articles about the moon or
George Bush, which probably lasted a few minutes at most.

I find this statement "it is also one of the world's leading
repositories of comical misinformation and nonsense." very misleading
and basically incorrect. I'd accept "It is also *potentially* one
of..." You feel like asking a journalist to start pressing "random
article" and to stop when he's found 3 blatant, ridiculous mistakes of
the type mentioned in this article...

Maybe we need to come up with an analogy to describe these errors.
Maybe something like cars on a freeway, which the vast majority of the
time works well. There are occasional breakdowns, but they don't
matter much, and get fixed pretty quickly. And just occasionally
there's a big wreck that lasts a few hours. That kind of thing...

Steve