Wikipedia != Authoritative?

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."

Comments

What's the point?

[jawschlech]

I think Wikipedia is more a social experiment than anything, but I treat it as a generally valid information source as much as I would other things on the internet. You have to put some amount of trust in others when you use their research.
Yes, you could insert false information into a Wikipedia article, but what would be the incentive? If you don't know information there's no reason to falsify it; nobody's monitoring your Wikipedia contribution progress. "Hahaha, now that kid's paper is going to have inaccurate data" doesn't sound like a really fufilling prank to pull, particularly since you can't really see the results. If someone wanted to destroy a wiki's integrity I think his first instinct would be to erase the content.
Also, yes, anyone can edit a Wikipedia article, but it's just as easy also write a very professional sounding article and post it on a professional looking website and suddenly it's True. The way I see it, the internet on whole isn't extremely reliable unless you take for granted that nobody really wants to maliciously sabotage your research and other people know what they're talking about before they start writing papers about things.
Yes, Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, but so can the internet itself. If the data you're trying to find are that important to you, you should probably check the library or get out there and do the research yourself.

Re:Your sig

[adamjaskie]

Atheism: An explicit belief in the lack of the existance of any god or supernatural power.

Re:Your sig

[solferino]

Not sure you've got your definition of atheism correct. The 'a' prefix at the start of the word means 'not'. Thus atheism believes there is or are no 'gods'. The problem with this is that negation itself is a kind of recognition of a concept i.e. you accept the concept by negating it.

Agnosticism just considers the question of exitence of god(s) as unknowable. Again it has the 'a' prefix but here the negation is of 'gnosis' i.e. knowledge.

The difference between the two can be shown by the different answers they give to the question 'Do you believe in [insert deity/s here]?'

Atheist: No
Agnostic: An answer to such a question is unknowable.