Wikipedia

Kilarney

The bad news:
Wikipedia has an average of just under four errors per article.

The good news:
It's not much worse than the Encyclopedia Britannica.

See this article.

jwallace

Interesting article: it reminds of the "Wikipedia Argument" episode from last year.

What can people expect - Wikipedia allows almost unrestricted access to any individual who wishes to post, edit or criticize the entries of others. I'm surprised that the ratio is THAT low for a public site.

tuttle88

I still love it, I do wish that the referencing was better, because I'm not allowed to use it as a source in a paper if I find something useful is want a source I can use.

MarcusNoble

Wikipedia is good for looking up something for personal reasons, however I hate the idea that people think it is a good source of information for thinks like school reports. My teacher for my speech communication class forbade us from using Wikipedia for research because of the one thing that seems to make it so great, it is being constantly "updated".

Kiey

I saw a report today that China was going to unblock wikipedia even though they refused to censor themselves for China. This should be interesting... or it would if it wasn't obvious that the Chinese government could go in and edit the articles themselves.

Alex

Wikipedia is good for looking up something for personal reasons, however I hate the idea that people think it is a good source of information for thinks like school reports. My teacher for my speech communication class forbade us from using Wikipedia for research because of the one thing that seems to make it so great, it is being constantly "updated".

While there is some validity to your teacher's concerns, they serve mainly to highlight a problem that exists with any source of information. How up to date is this source? Has it been recently modified for less than pure reasons? Especially with the prevalence of online sources of information outside classroom projects, these are things people should learn to think about.

For a school project, at least, some tools to spur this kind of thinking already exist. According to MLA format, when citing a Web source one should include both the date it was updated and the date it was accessed as part of the citation block. Presumably other citation formats that allow for web references include similar rules. If these rules are used correctly, everything a reader wants to check your sources is available: use that date accessed, and examine the corresponding point in Wikipedia's history.

I'd like to see a teacher who actually used this, thereby teaching his/her students about the importance of up-to-date information, rather than simply banning a frequently updated source. Taking it a step further, the onus is on the student to ensure that the version they've accessed hasn't been recently vandalized, cracked, editorialized, etc.

Apreche

I'd like to see a teacher who actually used this, thereby teaching his/her students about the importance of up-to-date information, rather than simply banning a frequently updated source. Taking it a step further, the onus is on the student to ensure that the version they've accessed hasn't been recently vandalized, cracked, editorialized, etc.

This gets me thinking about a phenomenon I encountered many times in school. Teachers often tell students something that isn't true as sort of a lazy way to prevent them from doing something wrong. For example, teachers will tell students to never start a sentence with the word "because". So rather than teach the students proper sentence structure, they just give them a general and false rule. Other examples are teachers saying to just use 3.14 instead of actually using pi. So rather than teach students the complicated skill of research, they just say "don't use Wikipedia". Yet another reason schools are teh suck.

EsonLinji

Teachers (everybody actually) are always doing this. It's part of the learning process, going from simple incomplete explanations to more intricate, more accurate ones. For example, when you first teach someone about square roots, you don't tell them about imaginary numbers, you just tell them they can't do the square root of a negative number. At that stage it's an added complication and requires a lot more understanding of other parts of mathematics that they haven't learnt yet, and would hinder rather than help their learning. When you show someone how to use a computer, you don't start with AND, OR, and NOT gates, you start with the mouse, keyboard and GUI.

The same applies with using Wikipedia as a source. Someone in grade three doing an assignment on their hometown isn't really at the stage of critically examining sources, and the teacher may be correct in saying not to use it. Someone almost finished school should be ready and know to independently verify sources, and should be allowed to use it.

tuttle88

The best way to use Wikipedia is as a primer. For example I had to write a paper on the Spanish Civil War, I knew NOTHING about it (except that it was in Spain, before ww2 and something to do with communists). Everything you are meant to put in an argumentative essay assumes that you know something and doesn't help you until you know the major players etc. so I head on over to Wikipedia read their article and then have enough information to write the paper properly.

HungryJoe

What do you think of all the new Wikipedia tomfoolery? Is it true that they traced the vandalism of Keith Olbermann's entry to Fox News? Is it true that 3M tried to erase their involvement with Agent Orange?

Omnutia

I wonder if the count would still be about 4 errors per article if you included all the falsified articles?

tuttle88

What do you think of all the new Wikipedia tomfoolery? Is it true that they traced the vandalism of Keith Olbermann's entry to Fox News? Is it true that 3M tried to erase their involvement with Agent Orange?

I read those things, pretty interesting, I think they traced the IP addresses but that may not be a clear. My ISP sends things through a proxy and I've gotten in trouble (actually banned from a site) because someone with the same IP as me was trolling, so maybe when you trace something to the BBC it might not be the BBC but some guy who works in the same building.

clx

Some good news regarding Wikipedia, a student at Caltech called Virgil Griffith has developed a tool that scans the IP addresses of edits, and compared it to known company IP ranges. This makes it possible to check which companies have been editing which entries.

News Source + examples

The tool seems to have attracted ALOT of attention, as seems to be down at the moment of posting, however yesterday while playing with it, i did find out some one from my company edited the history of Goatse .....
Website

HungryJoe

I read those things, pretty interesting, I think they traced the IP addresses but that may not be a clear. My ISP sends things through a proxy and I've gotten in trouble (actually banned from a site) because someone with the same IP as me was trolling, so maybe when you trace something to the BBC it might not be the BBC but some guy who works in the same building.

It looks like they traced some of the vandalism to the FBI and the CIA.

Jason

Anybody see the Wikipedia gag on The Office (rerun) last night?

HungryJoe

It's all fun and games until you put someone's history out.

Luke Burrage

Interesting article: it reminds of the "Wikipedia Argument" episode from last year.

It came up on the archive twitter feed, so I listened to the 20060130 episode, but can't find it on the forum.

Man, you guys have come a loooooong way since 2006! It was pretty painful to listen to how slowly you talk. Scott's arguing skills have not improved at all.