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The Chronicle of Higher Education: "Wikipedia is not 'truth,' Wikipedia is 'verifiability' of reliable sources. Hence, if most secondary sources which are taken as reliable happen to repeat a flawed account or description of something, Wikipedia will echo that."
5 comments:
Since I'm quoted in the Wikipedia, everything in there must be true!
All encyclopedias depend on already published work, all encyclopedias include some flaws. But Wikipedia is uniquely vulnerable to error.
I don't think we need the Chronicle of Higher Education to tell us this--in 2006, Stephen Colbert was able to change the Wikipedia entry on elephants by having members of the "Colbert Nation" bombard Wikipedia with incorrect edits claiming that the elephant population had increased (when, indeed, it verifiably had not).
P.S. Bill, I know you're trying to stop the spam-bots, but the way the word-verfs are printed is wrecking havok on these old eyes at 6:00 in the morning!
The printing is strictly blogger at work.
There's a brief Wiki entry on me, with errors in it. I tried to remedy them and got nowhere.
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