Wikipedia founder is asking for donations

An appeal from Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, appears each time the online encyclopedia is accessed.

Mr. Wales (shown above) is asking for financial donations to support Wikipedia, which he says is the largest encyclopedia in human history.

By allowing anyone to enter or alter data during most of its eight years of existence, Wikipedia is also the most inaccurate encyclopedia in human history.

We have documented some of the Wikipedia problems. We even added a category named Wikipedia.

One of the recent entries in our Wikipedia category was titled, Wikipedia declared Ted Kennedy death prematurely.

Another is titled, Wikipedia: the most quoted - least accurate site on the web.

Other entries deal with problems students have using Wikipedia as a research source including automatic failing grades from some college professors when they learn Wikipedia was referenced.

The Wikipedia appeal for donations can be found here.

Comments

[Brian McFadden]

Perry, as an instructor at several colleges in New York, I recognize the often inaccurate information that comes from Wikipedia (you'd be surprised to see the information that some students take to be true). However, Wales' appeal on Wikipedia's website suggesting that the site (eventually) could evolve into a bank of the sum of all human knowledge, I was intrigued about keeping Wikipedia "clean." In a recent post on my blog (Wikipedia: The Ultimate Good?), I offered a scenario where Wikipedia was forced to partner with a tech juggernaut like Microsoft/Google (a la Facebook's partnership with the former). While, as you point out, Wikipedia *did* prematurely report the death of Sen Kennedy, the site *did* accurately report the death of Meet the Press' Tim Russert before any other news/media outlet (according to the NY Times). Not to say this is a redeeming quality, but it does beg the question: Is Wikipedia a meshing of old media ("Encyclopedia Brittanica") and new, new media (think Twitter)?