Good site
Post by Cyberevil on Dec 6, 2005, 9:36pm

Reading the article on the Register today,

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/06/wikipedia_bio/

I came via Daniel Brandt's site and have to thank you for the interesting read on this board.

It was more than once that I found entries on Wikipedia to be vastly incorrect and/or biased, once I crosschecked with other sources. To tell me to correct that is futile, because usually when I need to look something up, I need information. If I sufficiently knew about the subject, I certainly would not need to research it.

The one time I tried to actually enter information into Wikipedia, on a subject I am specialised in, was an interesting experience.

A new entry was within hours marked for deletion, because "not every small software sh-thouse from the 80s deserves its own entry." It was about a company that at one time was the biggest software publisher for the C64 and where a couple of careers of people who -have- an entry on Wikipedia started. Why mention the toilet workers when the toilet itself shouldn't be mentioned?

Corrections to another entry were shortly after revoked by the apparent lackey of the other article's deleter, referring to him and that deletion and commenting that the changes to this entry were "self-advertisements" - mind you, the changes were to an article about a long extinct software company as well. Luckily someone sprung in and put my changes back in effect.

To put this short: It has no merit to look up anything on Wikipedia as long as the reliability and validity of entries remain that much in question. It has no merit to enter information into Wikipedia as long as changes and entries are not checked by a competent authority.

On a traditional dictionary I too might find inaccuracies and a certain bias, but certainly not in the dimensions Wikipedia presents itself with. Even just using a search engine provides better results, when conflicting views in search results are clearly identifiable as subjective, do not pretend to have the expected objectivity of an encyclopedia and can be weighed by myself.

Cyber
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