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Wikipedia - "I made it up"

lionking

In the Peanut Gallery
lionking
Joined
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A report in the Melbourne "Age" today about "one of the most prolific contributors and editors" to Wikipedia being not a professor in theology and law but an unqualified 24 year old. He contributed to 20,000 entries using such sources as "Catholicism for Dummies" to correct srticles.

Wikipedia is often used as a source in this forum. Perhaps now it should be treated cautiously - or not used at all!
 
Many people contribute to Wikipedia and the overall effect appears to be that it is mostly accurate and a good place to go to get introduced to a new subject and, most importantly, find references to learn more.

It appears to be a successful experiment and my opinion of its usefullness hasn't changed.
 
lionking said:
A report in the Melbourne "Age" today about "one of the most prolific contributors and editors" to Wikipedia being not a professor in theology and law but an unqualified 24 year old. He contributed to 20,000 entries using such sources as "Catholicism for Dummies" to correct srticles.

Wikipedia is often used as a source in this forum. Perhaps now it should be treated cautiously - or not used at all!
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As with any other reference, the articles in Wikipedia are only as good as their sources. Some are very well cited, others not so much. Be skeptical of any article which lists supposed facts without indicating where they came from, whether it's from Wikipedia or the Encyclopedia Brittanica.
 
Shera said:
Many people contribute to Wikipedia and the overall effect appears to be that it is mostly accurate and a good place to go to get introduced to a new subject and, most importantly, find references to learn more.

It appears to be a successful experiment and my opinion of its usefullness hasn't changed.
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I've used it for this reason as well, and the links seem sound, but the extent of misinformation now seems a problem. I happily rely on what I consider reputable resources, but can Wikipedia be so described?
 
Wikipedia often suffers from a dirth of information in factual articles and an abundance of material in fictional articles. Knuckles the Echidna has a bigger page than Herodotus, and there is more information on Star Wars than the Holocaust.
 
Wikipedia is a great resource on pop culture and technology. It's generally fairly good for science, so-so for history, and lousy for anything that touches on any sort of politics.

But if you want an episode list for Kim Possible, Wikipedia is the place.
 
lionking said:
A report in the Melbourne "Age" today about "one of the most prolific contributors and editors" to Wikipedia being not a professor in theology and law but an unqualified 24 year old. He contributed to 20,000 entries using such sources as "Catholicism for Dummies" to correct srticles.
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There are worse sources and his edit cound doesn't even put him in the top 300 editors.
 
lionking said:
I happily rely on what I consider reputable resources, but can Wikipedia be so described?
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It helps if you don't look at is as a single resource and more as a collection of articles that may or may not be reliable resources.

A good analog is "The Internet". There's a lot of good stuff, but a lot of crap as well. And "I read it on the Internet" is hardly an indication of reliability. As always, it is up to the reader to determine the worth of any information found in either.
 
geni said:
There are worse sources and his edit cound doesn't even put him in the top 300 editors.
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Is that right! And this guy spends 14 hours a day editing Wikipedia. It just shows how many people really have no lives......

Even if Wikipedia remains a reasonably good source, this story could do it serious damage. How many others would draw the conclusion, as I have, that this is a serious credibility problem?
 
lionking said:
Is that right! And this guy spends 14 hours a day editing Wikipedia. It just shows how many people really have no lives......
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Record for a sustained editing perioid is over 24 hours.

Even if Wikipedia remains a reasonably good source, this story could do it serious damage. How many others would draw the conclusion, as I have, that this is a serious credibility problem?
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Various. Given that citeing cedentials isn't a brilliant way to win a debate on wikipedia the conclusion is flawed.
 
What has the true identity of this individual to do with the reason or validity of his arguments? What if he was an impersonator?

The media is trying to make a case out of pure hype.
 
Chupacabras said:
What has the true identity of this individual to do with the reason or validity of his arguments? What if he was an impersonator?

The media is trying to make a case out of pure hype.
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He wrote an open letter to university professors and other academics citing his own credentials and using them to lend validity to Wikipedia.

He didn't just create an identity that was different. He explicitly added false details to try to lend credence to his positions.

I think that faking credentials goes fundamentally against the ethos of Wikipedia. It implies an acceptance of credentials as meaningful and relevant.
 
c4ts said:
Wikipedia often suffers from a dirth of information in factual articles and an abundance of material in fictional articles. Knuckles the Echidna has a bigger page than Herodotus, and there is more information on Star Wars than the Holocaust.
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There does need to be more information on historical stuff, but I hardly see the presense of extensive articles on fiction to be a bad thing. It's not like those articles are pressing against the articles on world war 2, crushing it. People aren't "flipping open the book" so to speak and landing on the page about Mario and Luigi. They get what they look for and they generally link to related stuff. Further, it's not like the people adding information to the fictional stuff are taking away time that could be spent boosting the other articles. Really, because those that do that, that's generally the stuff they know about. It's not like someone was faced with the choice "should I add this to the holocaust page or this to the Borg page?". They just happened to be reading one, noticed something, and added or altered something. Since the people editing wikipedia are a potentially endless font, there is no such thing as "wasted talent". Also, it's not like they are bumping up against the top of their server capacity. In other words, I can't think of a single reason why it shouldn't have extensive articles on Merry Poppins or the California Raisins.
 
lionking said:
He contributed to 20,000 entries using such sources as "Catholicism for Dummies" to correct srticles.
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Is this another name for "The Bible"?

Wikipedia is often used as a source in this forum. Perhaps now it should be treated cautiously - or not used at all!
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I definitively think Wikipedia should be treated with caution. Then again, all sources should be treated with caution. At least Wikipedia usually cites its original sources, so you can go back and check where they came from. That's more than could be said for many other places on the internet or in the meanstream media.

As someone else said a while ago: "Wikipedia is a good place to start, a really bad place to end."

As for the credentials bit, anybody who believes anything by an anonymous guy on the internet, without independent evidence, is being really dumb.
 
lionking said:
A report in the Melbourne "Age" today about "one of the most prolific contributors and editors" to Wikipedia being not a professor in theology and law but an unqualified 24 year old. He contributed to 20,000 entries using such sources as "Catholicism for Dummies" to correct srticles.

Wikipedia is often used as a source in this forum. Perhaps now it should be treated cautiously - or not used at all!
Click to expand...

And yet the vast majority of you HERE, worship Wiki... as it is written by man, and changes with the mood of man, and is backed up by the worldly.
 
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