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Wikipedia: edit out the bad and edit in the glamour

The unreliability of Wikipedia has gotten so bad that only the very naïve cite Wikipedia for facts in a debate or presentation.

Many people are influenced by the fact that the first listing in a Google search sends you to Wikipedia as if it were the authoritative source on everything. Actually, nothing could be further from the truth.

It’s common knowledge in many circles that if you don’t like what you see in Wikipedia, edit the entry.

Editing your own entry on Wikipedia is usually the province of vain celebrities keen for some good PR. But a new website has uncovered dozens of companies that have been editing the site in order to improve their public image.

The Wikipedia Scanner, which trawls the backwaters of the popular online encyclopaedia, has unearthed a catalogue of organizations massaging entries, including the CIA and the Labor party.

Workers operating on CIA computers have been spotted editing entries including the biography of former presidents Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, while unnamed individuals inside the Vatican have worked on entries about Catholic saints - and Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams.

Somebody from a computer traced to Democrat HQ edited a page on conservative American radio host Rush Limbaugh, calling him "idiotic", "ridiculous" and labelling his 20 million listeners as "legally retarded". The entry has since been corrected.

Best advice for those using Wikipedia is to use the on-line encyclopedia to point you in the right direction but don’t ever, ever use Wikipedia entries as the last word on any subject.

Are other on-line encyclopedias as unreliable as Wikipedia? We hope not.

We have posted several Wikipedia entries on this web site. They can be found by clicking on the Wikipedia category on the left-hand sidebar.

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Wikipedia online encyclopedia gets it wrong again

If you read this blog on a somewhat regular basis, you have learned just how inaccurate Wikipedia can be.

In review, Wikipedia was intended to be a free online encyclopedia that anyone could use. Problem is, anyone can also make entries and/or edit entries.

Wikipedia gets its name from the ‘wiki’ software that allows anyone to add to the web site or edit anything already on the site.

Wiki software is great for collective input when the participants can’t be in the same room. It does not lend itself to the construction of an online encyclopedia.

The latest Wikipedia gaff reported the death of Actor-comedian Sinbad.

Sinbad, who is very much alive and well, is probaly telling his freinds that stories of his death are highly exaggerated.

The erroneous Sinbad death story is here.

We reported about a prolific Wikipedia contributor and editor that was exposed as a fraud. He claimed to have advanced degrees in two fields but was really a 24-year-old college dropout. That story is here.

Even the Wikipedia chief warned students not to rely on the accuracy of Wikipedia. That story is here

Please note:We have posted so many articles about the online encyclopedia that we have placed them in their own category which can be found by scrolling down on the left sidebar to the “Category” section.

Prolific Wikipedia contirbutor exposed as fraud

Whatever credibility Wikipedia had left may have just evaporated. An article here tells the story of one of Wikipedia’s most prolific contributors and editors, who was supposedly a professor with degrees in theology and canon law, was exposed as a 24-year-old college dropout.

Wikipedia has thousands of contributors, and some people claim the web site is a place to discuss the accuracy of an article and they even go so far as to say the discussion weeds out inaccuracies. Well, if that is the case, why make a pretense of calling it an encyclopedia? Call it a discussion web site, not an encyclopedia.

The Wikipedia chief promises change but will anyone go back and review the 20,000+ entries made by the 24-year-old college dropout masquarading as a professor with degrees in two fields?

Avoid Wikipedia warns Wikipedia chief

We have warned in the past about taking Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, as the last word on a given subject.

The biggest reason is the ability of nearly anyone to add to the encyclopedia. Once an article in entered, nearly anyone can edit the document.

Well, we are not the only ones warning about the accuracy of the controversial Wikipedia. Now even the founder Jimmy Wales has warned students not to refer to Wikipedia.

This not only tells the Wikipedia story, it speaks very eloquently.

Wales said that he gets about 10 e-mail messages a week from students who complain that Wikipedia has earned them fail grades.

"They say, 'Please help me. I got an F on my paper because I cited Wikipedia'" and the information turned out to be wrong, he says. But he said he has no sympathy for their plight, noting that he thinks to himself: "For God sake, you're in college; don't cite the encyclopedia," the journal reports.

Some have said that Wikipedia should be called, “Jimbo’s Big Bag of Trivia.”

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Microsoft in hot water over Wikipedia edits

This story is about Microsoft getting in trouble with the Wikipedia folks.

Wikipedia is the Internet encyclopedia that allows article posting and article editing by nearly anyone.

Microsoft Corp. has landed in the Wikipedia doghouse after it offered to pay a blogger to change technical articles on the community-produced Web encyclopedia site.

While Wikipedia is known as the encyclopedia that anyone can tweak, founder Jimmy Wales and his cadre of volunteer editors, writers and moderators have blocked public-relations firms, campaign workers and anyone else perceived as having a conflict of interest from posting fluff or slanting entries. So paying for Wikipedia copy is considered a definite no-no.

Microsoft acknowledged it had approached the writer and offered to pay him for the time it would take to correct what the company was sure were inaccuracies in Wikipedia articles on an open-source document standard and a rival format put forward by Microsoft.

It is no surprise that Microsoft found inaccuracies in Wikipedia articles.

With the huge number of articles in Wikipedia submitted by anyone, there are bound to be inaccuracies, some of them deliberate.

Microsoft further maintained that some of the articles were inaccurate as well as heavily slanted.

Why didn’t Microsoft make their own edits of the Wikipedia articles in question? They could to it surreptitiously like most everyone else does.

Link to the Microsoft/Wikipedia story here. More on Wikipedia here.

80,000 Wikipedia entries by 24-year-old

A 24-year-old Canadian man has written and/or edited more than 80,000 Wikipedia entries.

Wikipedia is the on-line encyclopedia that has drawn recent criticism for the ease with which anyone can post to or edit existing articles. Story here.

Simon Pulsifer, a 24-year-old from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, is the most prolific Wikipedia writer and editor with 78,000 entries edited and 2,000 to 3,000 new articles authored by him.

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Wikipedia the wiki online encyclopedia

I often get e-mails from people who obviously think all articles in Wikipedia contain definitive information.

Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. Some articles are accurate and complete. Some started out that way but have been edited later - maybe edited more than once. So how do you know what to believe when you reference Wikipedia?

Wikipedia may have started out as a true encyclopedia with accurate articles but it has evolved into a giant conglomerate of entries that contain many misstatements and other inaccuracies.

Wikipedia is an online community devoted not to last night’s party or to next season’s iPod but to a higher good. It is also no more immune to human nature than any other utopian project.

Pettiness, idiocy, and vulgarity are regular features of the site. Nothing about high-minded collaboration guarantees accuracy, and open editing invites abuse.

Senators and congressmen have been caught tampering with their entries; the entire House of Representatives has been banned from Wikipedia several times. (It is not subtle to change Senator Robert Byrd’s age from eighty-eight to a hundred and eighty.

Have you, or do you know anyone who has altered an article on Wikipedia? Have you, or do you know anyone who has posted an article on Wikipedia? Me neither--on both counts. However, in another five years we will probably all know someone who has done one or the other or both.

When confronted with evidence of errors or bias, Wikipedians invoke a favorite excuse: look how often the mainstream media, and the traditional encyclopedia, are wrong!

As defenses go, this is the epistemological equivalent of “But Johnny jumped off the bridge first.”

If you use Wikipedia, my advice is to recognize it for what it is--part encyclopedia, part fairy tale and part vanity press.

Link here and here.

Wikipedia: just how accurate and reliable?

Wikipedia is the popular free online encyclopedia built collaboratively using wiki software. It gets its name because it is a wiki encyclopedia.

What is wiki software anyway?

It was pioneered by Ward Cunningham and named after the Hawaiian word for ‘quick’, a wiki is a website that makes it easy for anyone to contribute pages, and link them together.

Wikis as a type of social software that make it easy to communicate online. As simple to edit as it is to read, the wiki makes for the perfect online collaboration tool.

Since Wikipedia exists as a wiki, visitors are allowed to post and edit content.

What some people don’t realize is that almost all Wikipedia articles can be altered by anyone with a computer, a web browser and an Internet connection.

There was one widely publicized case of an unauthorized edit of the Wikipedia John Seigenthaler, Sr. biography as related here.

Next came the story of Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales shot by a friend of Mr. Seigenthaler. This story was also a hoax.

The news of the "shooting" even made the venerable London Times. The Times noted that after the first Seigenthaler scandal broke, the now "deceased" Jimmy Wales had, as he has so often, promised to tighten up a few nuts and bolts in the "encyclopedia's" editorial processes.

He certainly had his work cut out.

A cursory search today suggested that these procedures - which require contributors to register basic details before posting articles - were being defeated by a relentless wave of vandals, apparently co-ordinating their assaults from a series of chatrooms dedicated to its demise.

"The loss of credibility has caused commentators to question whether Wikipedia is destined to follow the LA Times's doomed experiment in unrestricted internet comment, Wikitorial, which had to be closed down after just two days under a bombardment of pornographic postings."

Is nothing sacred?

So is Wikipedia a source of reference, or just a great big game?

Former Britannica editor Bob McHenry characterized Wikipedia as a game, one of many multiplayer shoot-em-up games that have been made popular by the spread of networked computers

Now that we know that most any story in Wikipedia must be treated with suspicion, what are the consequences of changing Wikipedia articles by purposely posting inaccurate data? There is little legal recourse.

Federal law also protects online corporations — BellSouth, AOL, MCI Wikipedia, etc. — from libel lawsuits. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, passed in 1996, specifically states that "no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker."

That legalese means that, unlike print and broadcast companies, online service providers cannot be sued for disseminating defamatory attacks on citizens posted by others.

By the way, the Register article uses the incorrect spelling for the name Seigenthaler. Where do the inaccuracies and errors stop?

I often get emails containing quotes from Wikipedia as if the material was completely accurate. From now on, I will refer them to this post and let them decide.

Link here, here and here.