Wikipedia is Accurate...Yeah Right

Somebody did a research and found that there are 965 domains that simply scrap information from Wikipedia and serve it up with ads (usually Google AdSense).

So people get their information from Answers.com or whatever and don’t realize that their source is Wikipedia, a collection of facts, truths, half-truths, quarter-truths, myths and outright falsehoods written by complete amateurs. Of course those people, we are told, are idiots to believe everything that Wikipedia serves them - but they don’t know that what they’re reading comes from Wikipedia.

Pathetic.

Comments

[Peter Van Eynde]

Wikipedia is the perfect drug.

[Candy Rant]

Late last night I went to Wikipedia to look up Howard Nemerov, a famous award-winning poet, and this is what I found:

"Born in Rudyard, Michigan, his parents were Gertrude and Jack Meoff. His younger sister was the slut of the town and the only porn photographer the town had...Nemerov then began sex position (sic), first at Beaver College and later at benderover College, Brain University, and finally Washingina University...where he was Distinguished University Professor of Porn..."

I love Wikipedia!

[newster1]

The problem with Wikipedia is that ANYONE can go change anything to anything they like, and the wrong information as well as libel or other alterations can stay up for days, weeks or even longer before anyone notices, meanwhile Google picks up the cached pages and people copy the information.

[Fastillion]

Wikipedia is useful for 2 things. On topics of no actual value, it is ok. You want to know the sound track of a nintendo game. Also, it is useful for knowing what needs to be lied about. Anything involving history, politics, or even remotely related to either, in Wikipedia, will be entirely whitewashed. Wikipedia is a total joke for information. Wikipedia is totally censored to make 'TV reality' seem like it is real. Just ask people who defend it. They want Wikipedia used, FOR these reasons.

[Inigo]

Wikipedia is a great resource, but I think it's a bad example of using a wiki for knowledge management. The limitation of Wikipedia is that it aims to be purely a repository of existing knowledge. Wikipedia policies require that content on the site is written from a neutral point of view, is verifiable and contains no original research: even going so far as to ban synthesis of other sources. Although reasonable in an encyclopedia, these restrictions give the wrong idea about how wikis can be used for knowledge management. They encourage the idea that wikis are for knowledge capture, rather than knowledge creation, and that their main purpose is to produce a good knowledge store.