[Wikipedia-l] The marriage of Fredrika Bremer

[Lars Aronsson]

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 at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se