probing the wiki
Breaking news from The New York Times. Turns out the mighty Wikipedia cannot be trusted. Here’s an excerpt from the article:
Still, he said, he was trying to make Wikipedia less vulnerable to tampering. He said he was starting a review mechanism by which readers and experts could rate the value of various articles. The reviews, which he said he expected to start in January, would show the site’s strengths and weaknesses and perhaps reveal patterns to help them address the problems.In addition, he said, Wikipedia may start blocking unregistered users from creating new pages, though they would still be able to edit them.
The real problem, he said, was the volume of new material coming in; it is so overwhelming that screeners cannot keep up with it.
All of this struck close to home for librarians and researchers. On an electronic mailing list for them, J. Stephen Bolhafner, a news researcher at The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, wrote, “The best defense of the Wikipedia, frankly, is to point out how much bad information is available from supposedly reliable sources.”
I have been dubious of Wikipedia for a long time. After all the praise it has been receiving lately, it is nice to see someone try to open up everyones eyes. I just wonder why it took years for this to end up in a major publication.
And just for the record, as Wikipedia continues to become more mainstream, the number of submissions will eventually completely overwhelm the small group of people willing to actually edit the content. How long this experiment will last is an interesting question though.