[Web4lib] The Wikipedia Gotcha

[Alain D. M. G. Vaillancourt]

> 
> "I love it how I can use Wikipedia to win just about any argument.. 
> and it only takes a few seconds to make the edit beforehand."
> 

That's really cute, but is it true?

Many of the basic articles are patrolled so tightly at such a high
frequency that such a self centered edit would be reverted in a matter
of seconds.  Gotta be fast, real fast in saying and then acting out on
"heylookwikipediasaysImrightandyourewrong".

And then there's the 500 or so articles I've been watching for several
years.  I just haven't seen that kind of edit, or what could be that
kind of edit very often.

On the other hand, in the last forty years or so I've seen a lot of
persons interpret a printed source as they wished to "prove" that they
were right and others were wrong.  I've seen this in day to day
arguments as well as scholarly writings.  

My best source of fun in the latter comes from a study that came out as
an article titled "'Memex' as an image of potentiality in information
retrieval research and development" by Linda C. Smith.  In her study
Linda C. Smith showed, by a thorough analysis of those articles which
cited Vannevar Bush's 1945 "As We May Think" article, that shcolars
quoted what they wanted in order to prove what they wanted regardless
of the original intent of the author, Vannevar Bush and the presence of
contradictory statments in other places in the text.    

Alain Vaillancourt

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