The (already pretty sizable) grain of salt with which I take Wikipedia articles just got a little bit bigger. On the bright side, though, this AP wire story will probably be the first thing a lot of people have ever heard about Wikipedia, and there's no such thing as bad publicity, right? Right?
Grains of salt notwithstanding, the strength of wikipedia (indeed the wiki philosophy in general) is what some people simply don't get; the point is that eventually someone (who presumably recognised the error or knew better) would get around to editing the page so as to remove the offending aspect of the page.
Outright lies of course are easy to see through and this example does just as much to demonstrate the robustness of the format as it's supposed fragility.
It's not merely a static work of reference, but a growing, developing repository of knowledge, and if you become aware of an error or omission, you can edit it. Right there. It also encourages you to be prepared *not to believe* everything you read, especially on the internet.
Posted by: mihaly | December 22, 2005 at 06:53 AM