Walker
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WikipediaI was going to get some info about Coldplay's latest album and the Wikipedia article about said band started like this:
| Quote: | | Coldplay are an English rock band and they are absolute bollocks. chris martin is pretenntious little knowitall and likes to lick gwyneth paltrow's fanny. |
Say what? 
I know that Wikipedia isn't the most trustworthy source of information, but this?
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Lazar
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It's typical Wikipedia vandalism: you'll see tons of it if you look through the article histories.
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Deborah
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I know what you mean -- that's disgusting, letting such a glaring misspelling ("pretenntious") get published!
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Uriel
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Are there no standards anymore! 
Seriously, I have major gripes with Wikipedia as an authoritative source, and the fact that anyone can write in it is the big one. The second gripe I have is that it has obviously paid off somebody at Google so that it comes up almost at the top of any search you run, so that it LOOKS like a major authority, and guarantees that it is widely read. I think the whole idea of a popular for the people by the people encyclopedia is just awful. Call me elitist, but when it comes to information, I don't think it should be a democratic process at all -- I like having experts and authorities with accountability standing behind the serious encyclopedias I read.
Thank you for listening tp my diatribe, and that will be my soapbox for the day. 
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Walker
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| Uriel wrote: | | Seriously, I have major gripes with Wikipedia as an authoritative source, and the fact that anyone can write in it is the big one. The second gripe I have is that it has obviously paid off somebody at Google so that it comes up almost at the top of any search you run, so that it LOOKS like a major authority, and guarantees that it is widely read. I think the whole idea of a popular for the people by the people encyclopedia is just awful. Call me elitist, but when it comes to information, I don't think it should be a democratic process at all -- I like having experts and authorities with accountability standing behind the serious encyclopedias I read. |
I agree, though I'll admit that I use Wikipedia pretty often, because it's such an easy way of finding information. It's all there at one place.
| Uriel wrote: | | Thank you for listening tp my diatribe, and that will be my soapbox for the day. |
Anytime!
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Uriel
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All I can say is it blows that Encyclopaedia Britannica stopped being a free site.
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Deborah
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I usually use wikipedia as a starting point. I was taken aback when I saw that one of the attorneys where I used to work had used it as an authority in a cite!
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Rio
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I think Wikipedia is an accurate site; a great starting point for quick information and other references. I think something like the Coldplay incident always gets cleared up in the end.
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Walker
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| Rio wrote: | | I think Wikipedia is an accurate site; a great starting point for quick information and other references. I think something like the Coldplay incident always gets cleared up in the end. |
The Coldplay incident was extreme, though. I've seen other stuff that wasn't accurate, for instance, I once compared the English and Swedish articles about my hometown, and those two articles differed when it came to the population of the city in question. The difference was like 10.000 people!
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Benjamin [inactive]
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| Walker wrote: | | Rio wrote: | | I think Wikipedia is an accurate site; a great starting point for quick information and other references. I think something like the Coldplay incident always gets cleared up in the end. |
The Coldplay incident was extreme, though. I've seen other stuff that wasn't accurate, for instance, I once compared the English and Swedish articles about my hometown, and those two articles differed when it came to the population of the city in question. The difference was like 10.000 people! |
Funny you should say that — for ages, there was a difference of about 500,000 between the population of Glasgow on the English and French wikipedias. In this case though, what actually counts as 'Glasgow' is a bit ambiguous, and the authors of the two articles had probably used different definitions.
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