Wikipedia and accuracy
“At the end of the day, it [Encyclopedia Britannica] provided something the Wikipedia sorely lacks, namely ethos. The reall [sic] story of the Wikipedia is why would anyone presume anything written in there is accurate? Where’s the accountablity? Well, there is none.”
I think this is reductive and inaccurate. It’s like saying that there’s no ethos in the IT Analysis space because one analyst acted out of tainted interests. There are hundreds of thousands of articles on Wikipedia, most of them with a large contingent of active, interested contributors and editors with a very strong ethos of non-partiality and accuracy. Deriding the whole becuase of these recent individual episodes is ridiculous.
The larger question is why would anyone trust anything they found on the internet as a sole source of information? They shouldn’t, and if they do so they are fools. Fools! As technologists we should be training users to view everything they find on the web as potentially suspect. As parents or teachers doubly so.
Listen folks, the web as a source of information isn’t going anywhere. There’s no turning back from the edge. User-generated content, with all its foibles and flaws (and yes, all its wonderful subjectivity) is all around us and we must find a way to deal with it. Calling names and deriding isn’t going to help - we’ve got to train those new to the medium, from our grandparents to our children, that they should watch and listen closely and critically.
I do agree with this, though:
“…good content written by professionals with editorial oversight isn’t going away anytime soon.”
and I’m darn glad of it.
via Scripting News
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