WikiPedia Magic

I see this story about US Government staff editing (positively and negatively) biographies of various political figures that appear in Wikipedia. A sign of its success I guess.

What is interesting is that when some of the editing was considered to be politically motivated, a Congress spokesperson said “I presume that if they did not want people to edit, they wouldn’t allow you to edit.”

They ? People ? You ?
Talk about missing the point.
Now who’s paranoid ?
What happened to we ?

Still it shows the limitations as well as strengths of Wikipedia. All information is “political” – this way the debate about the words happens in public, until commonly accepted “facts” evolve. Wikipedia will never be perfect, but it will always be getting there.

2 thoughts on “WikiPedia Magic”

  1. Wikipedia helps along the illusion that, “It must be true — I saw it on the Internet!” The fact that anyone can come along and change an entry is a severe weakness of wikis in general. No matter how deep the pooling of ignorance and opinions, it will hever be a high quality resource. Unfortunately a small fraction of internet users have any inkling of how to judge the veracity or authenticity of websites. Your mileage may vary, of course.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.