p2pnet - rss feed: Wikipedia or Wackypedia?
p2p news / p2pnet: The Wikipedia is being vandalised so frequently that a volunteer army of nearly 1,000 supporters has been recruited to police and correct the entries, say reports.
UK prime minister Tony Blair was given the new middle names of Whoop-de Doo, "Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, makes surprise visits to Ilford instead of Iraq and Robbie Williams earns his millions eating pet hamsters," says the Times Online. "Oh, and David Beckham was a Chinese goalkeeper in the 18th century."
Last week Blair’s 19-page entry was changed as many as 25 times a day, says the story.
Is the Wikipedia, "one of the world’s great co-operative ventures" or merely, "just another unreliable website full of mistakes, misconceptions and misleading entries?" - asks the Independent.
It goes on, "Alarm bells rang last month when newspapers in Massachusetts discovered that the staff of Congressman Marty Meehan had polished his biography by, for instance, deleting his long-abandoned promise to serve only four terms and praising his ‘fiscally responsible’ voting record.
"Detective work by Wikipedia found that other offices on Capitol Hill had engaged in skulduggery - not all of them with flattering results, such as the false reference to Oklahoma’s Tom Coburn being voted ‘most annoying senator’.
And late last year Today journalist John Seigenthaler’s Wiki entry said he was involved in the assassination of US President John Kennedy.
The Times story has Jimmy Wales, Wiki founder and president, saying, "I thought it would be overrun with idiots but there are far more people doing good than those who try to be harmful."
Also See:
Times Online - Comedy of errors hits the world of Wikipedia, February 12, 2006
Independent - Wikipedia under the microscope over accuracy, February 14, 2006
polished his biography - Marty Meehan reality show, January 31, 2006
assassination - Wiki hoax post author apologises, December 12, 2005
February 14th, 2006 at 5:05 pm
The first line of this story is wrong, but as the news reports have got it wrong as well, p2pnet can’t really be blamed. Wikipedia is written and run by volunteers, so much more than a “1000 volunteers” are already around and some have taken to checking out what other questionable edits have been made to articles about politicians. The Boston Globe just did a really good series on Wikipedia (http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2006/02/12/bias_sabotage_haunt_wikipedias_free_world/).
February 14th, 2006 at 7:45 pm
Most people will find that much of the information in Wikipedia is accurate. Futhermore, as an encylopedia, Wikipedia should not be the end of research; it should be the beginning. Encylopedias are third or secondary sources, and in order to gain a better understanding of events, one MUST look to primary sources.
February 15th, 2006 at 2:07 pm
Just as Wikipedia contains some errors, the media also gets things wrong. The difference is that journalists are paid to be right, whereas Wikipedians do it out of their own free will.
No-one is “recruited” to Wikipedia, the supporters decide to do it for the good of the encyclopedia. And there are significantly more than 1000 of them.
Most of these articles fail to mention that most edits by vandals (hilariously referred to by The Times as “hackers”) on prominent articles are reverted within minutes if not seconds. To be honest, i’m surprised that the article on Blair is only edited 25 times a day. Its not many at all when you consider that Blair runs the country and so is prone to school-boy remarks by opposers.
They arent helping by promoting Wikipedia as “the online equivalent of throwing eggs”. Its like pointing out the graffiti around the streets and telling people that “anyone can do it, just grab some paint and join in the fun!”
February 15th, 2006 at 11:12 pm
What’s more troubling about Wikipedia than the petty vandalism are the ideologues. Any PR firm can pay to have their employees spend hours on end editing Wikipedia. As such, some of the more sophisticated ones have become very established and influential there, so Wikipedia has a strong bias on a number of issues.