Wikipedia not so authoritative, after all?

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Checking out RPG Codex, I noticed the link to a thread about Wikipedia (here). The opening post was very short and the central part was the link to an article at USA Today written by John Seigenthaler, Robert Kennedy's former assistant when the latter was Attorney General. Here's a bit of said article:

And the source is here.

If malice is such a problem, wonder about all those people who don't mean ill but simply have no idea about the subject they are writing on, other than rumours. I started wondering some time ago, after noticing examples of poor English in some articles. Who writes those? What are their qualifications? What are their sources? Wikipedia is certainly good and it's good that it's around, but perhaps it shouldn't always be accorded such a credibility as it tends to be.

 

132 days. Was it removed by request, or did the people who organize Wikipedia find the mistake and delete it?

EDIT: Checked the link; removed by request.

 

If you want real credibility, real books from real historicians will always surpass that of Wikipedia and the like; or so I think.

 

There are a lot of reference sources out there that have the same problem, both on the internet and in print. I can remember in the early 90s when there was a big fuss about a certain published movie review book. It was being written by people with a quota of films so high that they could not possibly watch all of the films that they were to review and as a result they were found to be writing the reviews without even having watched the films.

In general I would never completely trust a reference source unless I have some reason to believe that it was prepared by a professional researcher and had proper editorial checking. Even then I would still look for another independent source to check the information.

 

Yeah there is plenty of crap in Wikipedia and while there are some really good articles too it's allways better to confirm the facts from somewhere else. I've noticed several articles in there that have been somewhat biased or had minor factual mistakes. There are plenty of poorly written articles too. The best way would probably be if people just reported every time they saw these but quite frankly most (including me) just won't bother.

 

That can't be true, can it? I mean, they must check the stuff they put on their website and make sure that it has at least some truth to it, right?

 

No, wikipedia can be updated by ANYONE at ANYTIME. I could go and write that George Bush is the King of Texas and it would go on their website, until someone else corrected it.

Someone once put on the article about abortion that it was murder. It stayed up for less than a minute or so. At lease, so I once read on the internet.

 

Yeah, I just went over and added something to the description of the city where I live - easy as pie to do, completely anonymous, and there is no one officially approving the changes.

 

This issue of accuracy is not limited to Wikipedia -- the entire net is riddled with this sort of thing, which is why I am always telling my students to use books that have been editted and vetted to ensure accuracy when they are doing research, rather than rely on Bob Jones' website for data. Yes, books can have errors and misinformation too, but it's less likely.

 

By the way, I think there are some Wikipedia pages which require registering and login to post. No?

 

It is a general guideline that you should never trust information from the Internet that comes from non-authentic source. Most of the internet sites should be considered unreliable source of information. Wikipedia is a good thing to find interesting stuff which you can then check at proper places.

 

I wonder how many other things like this are on Wikipedia yet to be corrected. Wikipedia is trash.

 

It depend on what kind of information do you want , no source is completely objective and the fact that an article can be edited by anyone is a good thing ,in most cases at least

 

If you're looking a variety of viewpoints (i.e., opinion pieces without any substantiation), perhaps. If you're looking for accurate information, not so much.

 

What I find disappointing is that wiki includes the functionality of attributing a page (or giving a bibliography; heaven forbid citing one's sources? ) but no one seems to use it.

If I saw such an element to a wiki page, I'd feel more comfortable using the info the page provides...

(I.E. if it's fact and the truth, you ain't the only person who's ever written on it, so corroborate your story )

 

I don't use wikipedia that much, but I did use it for a post on the British historian Edward Gibbon, and I did notice that the author was clever enough--brilliant enough, really--to write his article in Gibbon's own not-so-easily-imitated style. A good assessment, too, even if I did agree with it.

So its disappointing to learn that unfair partisanship has reared its head at wikipedia. I don't object to partisanship, but it should always be apparent for what it is, like many of the posts in this thread. A reliable, reasonably unbiased--no author can be completely unbiased--source of information is important on the internet, and wikipedia has assumed that role, but, apparently, not the responsibility of living up to it.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_Sports_Confederation

LOL!

Ah, crap, they changed it. But you can still view it if you click on "view 3 deleted edits"

[ December 03, 2005, 11:55: Message edited by: Bahir the Red ]

 

On subjects which people care about the information tends to be pretty good as people are more likely to hash it out on the talk page and demand sources. If it's something like that - well, I guess no one cares about that guy enough to fix up his biography

Wikipedia hardly claims to be authoritative though - and it would be pretty silly to try and claim so.