Wikipedia != Authoritative?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Sunday September 5, 2004 @02:02AM from the well-duh-people dept.

Frozen North writes "Recently, this article in the Syracuse Post-Standard caused a stir by dismissing Wikipedia as an authoritative source, and even suggesting that it was a little deceptive by looking too much like a "real" encyclopedia. Techdirt suggested an experiment: insert bogus information into Wikipedia, and see how long it takes for the mistake to be removed. Well, I did that experiment, and the results weren't good: five errors inserted over five days, all of which lasted until I removed them myself at the end of the experiment."

2 of 783 comments (clear)

Re:I added an entry about myself by BetterThanCaesar · 2004-09-05 02:19 · Score: 5, Funny

No, you're still there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_Coward

--
"Stop failing the Turing test!" -- Dilbert
Re:How about another experiment? by mblase · 2004-09-05 02:20 · Score: 5, Funny

Grab an article out of a "real" encyclopedia, and compare it to the Wikipedia article. Do they factually match?

Yes, sometimes it's even word-for-word....