Will Richardson did a presentation at a conference I attended, and had some statistics about how quickly errors are fixed in Wikipedia. I guess people take ownership over certain pages and "protect" them from error. There have been some entries that have had to be shut down to prevent them from frequent spamming changes, such as George Bush and John Kerry during election time, etc.
My question is, well for consistency's sake, that's all fine and good, but what if my (imaginary) 10 year old accesses a wikipedia entry at the very moment it contains incorrect information? There is the biggest problem.
You can read Richardson's latest entry here, it's actually about an issue with it.
The conference I attended had a lot of teachers at it, and while they try to embrace the internet and various new technologies, they all seemed to put their foot down about wikipedia. In a way, I'm glad, because I still want people to have to locate "scholarly" resources for facts, not just communal resources that might be scholarly or accurate.
On the other hand, talk about peer reviewed - wikipedia might end up being the ultimate peer-reviewed resource. You can even access the list of what changes have been made and when if you're wondering about accuracy of a specific fact.
Where I expand on wikipedia
My question is, well for consistency's sake, that's all fine and good, but what if my (imaginary) 10 year old accesses a wikipedia entry at the very moment it contains incorrect information? There is the biggest problem.
You can read Richardson's latest entry here, it's actually about an issue with it.
The conference I attended had a lot of teachers at it, and while they try to embrace the internet and various new technologies, they all seemed to put their foot down about wikipedia. In a way, I'm glad, because I still want people to have to locate "scholarly" resources for facts, not just communal resources that might be scholarly or accurate.
On the other hand, talk about peer reviewed - wikipedia might end up being the ultimate peer-reviewed resource. You can even access the list of what changes have been made and when if you're wondering about accuracy of a specific fact.