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February 09, 2006
How accurate is Wikipedia
As BBC News notes, the recent big hullabaloo is over members of the US congress editing their own biographies. Although the Wikipedia folks were stirred up, it's hardly surprising that some of those having the drive to win the hugest popularity contests of all would not feel undue moral discomfort about adjusting the online record. They probably see it as setting the facts straight.
What I found interesting in the article was this statement, "A December 2005 study by the British journal Nature found it [Wikipedia] was about as accurate on science as the Encyclopaedia Britannica."
In a way looking things up in Wikipedia is like getting support using Google to find answers in mailing lists, which is inevitably how it ends up when you're fixing something. That's an amazing realization when you think that, "I read online that...," is a euphemism for, "Here comes a tall tale."
Maybe the end has come for normally published reference works. And I can stop creating man pages.
Posted by Mark at February 9, 2006 09:18 PM
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