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Ex-Britannica Editor Reviews Wikipedia
0-9a-f writes "Robert McHenry, one-time Editor in Chief of Encyclopædia Britannica, offers his thoughts on Wikipedia at Tech Central Station. While many Wikipedia zealots might discount his obvious bias outright, his broad argument is difficult to ignore. A million monkeys might eventually write Shakespeare, but how would they recognise it once they had?"
His whole point is that the article started off reasonably good and through haphazard editing sounds like a highschool student wrote it.
I use wikipedia as well, but just to get a starting point on a subject I know little about.
"A REAL computer has ONE speed and the only powersaving it permits is when you pull the power leads out of the back!"
I don't really get why some people get so upset over WIkipedia, and wants to defend ordinary encyclopedias as "more authoritative".
When it really matters, Wikipedia is of course not a primary source to go to. But then, neither are ordinary encyclopedias. When it _really_ matters, you go to the original research papers, subject-specific anthologies and conference proceedings. You will likely never see Encyclopedia Britannica referred to as an authority for an FDA application, for example, or for an envrionmental consequence analysis for some proposed industrial development.
What encyclopedias are good for, on the other hand, is to give a quick tour of and route into an area the reader isn't already familiar with. And since any deeper delving into the subject will require referencing a lot of other sources in any case, any smaller biases or omissions in this "portal text" isn't going to matter.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
ack! It's not smilk, it's "Malk", now with vitamin R!
Monstar L
From an academic point of view I can quote say Encyclopadia Brittanica article on the charango from the 1995 edition.
You can do such things with Wikipedia as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Slashdo t&oldid=279882
Life is just nature's way of keeping meat fresh.
Wikipedia is a community effort.
If we replace the word "community" with the word "committee" the problem is obvious.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
That is the absolute least likely thing to happen. Holocaust articles, Judaism, US election/political figures, and articles about the Middle East are subject to the most scrutiny of any article type on Wikipedia. Massive vandalism of the type you indicate to fool little Johnny would be instantaneously reverted, and the user vigorously blocked without warning. Little Johnny would never have a chance to glance it.
It is the small, subtle changes to data on obscure topics which is to be feared, not a broad sweeping alterations of a major topic.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Mod up the parent. The full entry for the Oort cloud in the Encyclopedia is much longer (and is part of the 20 page entry for Comets. I don't think I should paste the entire entry, but here's a couple of sentences just to get the idea:
The most probable hypothesis is that [the Oort cloud] was formed at the same time as the giant planets by the very process that accreted them. The Soviet astronomer Viktor S. Safronov developed this accretionary theory of the planetary system mathematically in 1972. According to his model, the planets originated from a disk or a ring of dust around the Sun, and cometary nuclei are nothing more than primordial planetesimals that accreted first and became the building blocks of the planets. From the accreted mass of the giant planets, Safronov predicted the correct order of magnitude of the mass of the Oort cloud, which was built up by those planetesimals that missed colliding with the planetary embryos and were thrust far away by their perturbations. In effect, the Oort cloud in this theory becomes the necessary consequence and the natural by-product of the accretion of the giant planets.