[Web4lib] Problems with Wikipedia

[Francis Kayiwa]

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On Jan 4, 2007, at 4:14 PM, Mezynski, Andrzej wrote:

> Paul,
>
> you sound like my apartment manager when I report a plumbing  
> problem :-)
> (did you fix it, well why not?)
> But seriously, as an "end user" I can deal with that, but as an  
> academic
> librarian I must consider warning students about the possibility of
> encountering strange and/or misleading and/or offensive "data" on
> Wikipedia.

Andrzej,

You are missing one key thing about Wikipedia that Paul alluded to.  
You can choose to be a consumer (which it seems you have done) or you  
can be part of the community. Your words were

<verbatim>
Seems that Wikipedia has serious problems with guarding its content from
hateful/stupid additions.
</verbatim>

Given your the claim above it seems like you expect this to be done  
for you. Paul elects to be part of the solution rather than a  
"consumer".

Like I said in my initial post. Verify these facts. If your concern  
is the students then you can relay this information to them, but I  
will hazard that they already know this. :-) Wikipedia is not a novel  
item to them.

As I mentioned to someone offlist, I always like to send people to

http://www.amazon.co.uk

Search for

Search for the manufacturers description of the

Sony Basic Rechargeable RF Wireless Headphone

Unlike Wikipedia, I cannot edit this. I notified amazon.co.uk ages  
ago and it is yet to be altered (as-I-type)


> One "insensitive" sentence is easy to detect but what about  ... e.g.
> politicians removing their "love rap-sheets"?  Or ethnic groups adding
> "glorious facts" to their history?

Here again. Fix these errors or use ones you can trust. This is how  
Wikipedia gets better. Many eyes looking at the same information.

For your amuseotainment read the history files and you will be  
fascinated by how quickly the erroneous facts get altered.

regards,
./fxk
===============
Francis Kayiwa
Library Systems Team
4-180, MC 234
T: +1.312.996.2716
W: http://www.uic.edu/~kayiwa
Key: http://tigger.uic.edu/~kayiwa/kayiwa.gpg


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