Monday, December 5, 2005

Wikipedia: Check your facts, then check your facts again... Standard fact-checking practice should go up a notch or three when using Wikipedia, the communally-edited encyclopedia whose contributors range from civic-minded librarians and obsessive-compulsive editors to malicious vandals, axe-grinding partisans... and mistake-prone beginners who don't know how to use the editing program... most of them anonymous... Two recent Wikipedia controversies: The first falls in the malicious vandal category, a nasty attack on a former editor of the Nashville Tennessean... John Seigenthaler: A false Wikipedia 'biography' New York Times: Snared in the Web of a Wikipedia Liar This next one is, well, complicated.... The blog item "In a pickle over Wikipedia editing" launched a mostly-for-insiders tempest in a "teapod" concerning Adam Curry, a great promoter of podcasting... who was accused of anonymously editing a Wikipedia article to make himself look like even more the "podfather." Coincidentally, it was an article that I've written about and even contributed to a few times, mostly concerning things that happened while I was watching (and listening) back in Cambridge in 2003. (If I've read this correctly, it looks like Curry, after his anonymity slipped, admitted to accidentally deleting some information from the Wikipedia article -- the mistake-prone Wiki beginner syndrome. Then he apologized for deleting a few other lines on purpose, but he attributed that to his faulty memory... concerning some of those 2003 events in Cambridge.) 11:25:04 PM    comment []

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