An article appeared this morning on Wired News which cites Wikipedia as the source.
Wow!
I used to write for Wired a fair amount. I cited Wikipedia once and I could hear my editor’s head exploding at a distance of 5,000 miles.
And quite right too. Put bluntly, Wikipedia is a great resource but the fact that anyone can change any entry any time means that it simply isn’t reliable enough for proper journalism.
Technorati Tags: Wikipedia, Wired, sources
Related posts:
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Wiki on Wired? Weird!
I think on the whole Wikipedia is a great site for reminding yourself of basic facts you probably already know. Like the year of the Battle of Hastings or the pH of sulfuric acid, for instance. But, I certainly wouldn’t trust it on anything religious, political, ethical, moral, controversial………
It’s interesting to hear that the count of errors Wikipedia has compared to other sources (I’ve heard them compared to Brittanica online) is about equal, surprisingly.
But it does seem that for any info you can find there, you could find a less changeable source (e.g. print pubs).
Ok, I here this argument over and over that wikipedia is bad because it can be changed at anytime. But perhaps instead of making this argument someone wakes up and smells the… well wiki. It has mechanisms so that you can see who changed what and when. How ’bout we start teaching users to use this feature properly so that they can confirm something as being ‘fact’ instead of a random defacement?
It should become clear rather quickly if numbers are being changed all the time that one needs to go and find another source for this information. Simply put use wikipedia the way its designed instead of trying to make it the holy grail for information.