The man behind a fake posting on the online encyclopedia Wikipedia that linked a journalist to the Kennedy assassinations has apologised.
Tennessean Brian Chase said he added to the entry to trick a co-worker.
Mr Chase, who added the false information to the biography in May 2005, said he did not realise that the online encyclopedia was taken so seriously.
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Chase is right about one thing: Wikipedia is not taken seriously. Well, by anyone other than a handful of Wikipedia-zealots, who don’t believe there is such a thing as objective truth anyway.
It is taken seriously……….by people who don’t understand that it’s about half crap. Love the idea though, and now the new rules will make it a little more usable. Sadly you can’t put anything on the web with public interaction. Ask somebody with a popular blog about the blog spam. I’ve stopped allowing replies just to get rid of mine.
Wikipedia = online pub. This is where all come to post their diatribe and their is still no reliability. I will just register with a fake name and credentials to avoid personal responsibility. With all the cranks and jokers on the web, systems that believe in the honor system aren’t, or horribly naive. People behave much better when they must operate in the open instead of lurking in the shadows. Why do you think we have so much spam and viruses? Gone are the days when you asked someone if their refrigerator is running.
It’s not just the internet. You’ve always had to look at information with a critical eye, and never rely on a single source. The internet is worse because it affords the luxury of anonymity, to a point. I will admit I never read the comments anymore on Fark.com. It tends to bring on homicidal thoughts.
Humm. Somehow, as a professional librarian, I probably ought to post a lecture here about how you properly judge the value of a reference source: is the source reputible, who is the author, what credentials do they have to talk about the topic, blah, blah, blah, but that’s too boring and predictable. What I will say is that Wikipedia is a great demonstration of why decent (read: reasonably reliable) information costs money. I hate it, information ought to be free, but it just isn’t. Best thing we can do is to fund libraries so that they can foot the bill every year for the whole community to have access to the most reliable sources of information available.
Such a vehicle should be a service of the National Archives. If the National Bureau Of Standards can be the custodian of the official time and distance units – perhaps someone ought to be in charge of the facts of history.
Yeah – give it to the government – they’ll be fair and balanced.
Well, they can always try http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Main_Page