One thought on “Who Says Wikipedia Is Accurate?”

  1. The problem with the furor over Wikipedia is not that there may be factual inaccuracies in the articles, it is the implication that other media (like newspaper and television news sources) are free of such inaccuracies.

    It’s been pretty depressing to see that some people would be more trustful of the words of an ‘authority’ than of the result of a democratic information-gathering project. An unbiased source of information is a rare thing… but if you write your local paper about factual innacuracies in their reporting, you might at best get some exposure in the letters to the editor. With Wikipedia, you might end up rewriting the front-page headline. And if someone else find errors or bias in what you wrote, they can come and fix it. Highly contentious subjects get moderated to dampen the possibility of abuse.

    I’ll take Wikipedia over ANY other encyclopedic source of knowledge any day. The fact that people can call ‘bullshit’ on articles they see to be inaccurate is a refreshing change to the spoon-fed monolithic news sources in other media.

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