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The Dangers of Open Content
gihan_ripper writes "Recently released open movie Elephants Dream found itself in hot water with Catalonians after accidentally using an offensive word instead of 'Català' in the subtitle menu. The cause? Designer Matt Ebb had used Wikipedia to look up the Catalan word for Catalan on a day when the entry had been vandalized. He writes about this experience on the Elephant Dream blog.
We may have scoffed at John Seigenthaler over his criticisms of Wikipedia, but it gives us pause for thought when we to heavily on Wikipedia."
Why would I trust it as a starting point if I can't trust it as a source?
You shouldn't trust any single source.
Wikipedia is a useful starting point as it will contain pointers (or at least useful search terms) to begin looking for other items to reference. It's no different to any other encyclopedia in that respect.
Surely you don't use a single soruce for information for an important project?
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
I'm catalan. And I can say that lately there's been a lot of hatred against our nation pushed by some spanish political parties (Yet I don't to turn this into a political discussion). This problem appeared because of a vandalized entry in wikipedia, but could also have appeared if a person had modified the film or written it wrong from the start, so the problem here is not the reliance on open content, but the reliance on people's goodness, which in the open [content, source, ...] is mostly there, but can be displaced by some feelings, most of them learnt and fueled since childhood.
But the same thing's been happening throughout the history. Surely if you looked on recognized encyclopedias some time ago, a lot of entries about slaves would be unaccpetable by today standards. The same happens over conquered soil after a war, when the losers become the vermin that had to be erradicated and the winners the saviors of the people (and usually end up being as bad as those they overthrew). And many other examples could be given.
So the problem here is the open content or close-minded people?
I think I found the real problem.
When writing a program, you don't look up the meaning of a command in three sources do you?
Regularly. And only then do I get a complete description, if not find an error in one.
When wiring a house, you don't check three different copies of the electrical code.
If one, even. Really, if there were multiple versions (not copies) released at the same time, of course I would look at all of them.
When working on your car, all you need is your Chilton's.
And that's exactly why my interior door panel on my old 1993 Grand Am held on for dear life by three screws. Sure it was my fault for not being gentle; but the factory shop manual, I discovered, had a full blown illustration and much more detailed procedure. Chiltons and Haynes both throw five models over ten years into one book, making it useless for anything but drivetrain work. They may as well cut the interior and body work out of their manuals entirely, along with much of the electrical and vacuum system stuff.
Again, if Pontiac made several publications with varying but similar information, I'd want all of them, and I did own both the Haynes and Chiltons manuals, occasionally referring to all of them.
The point is, you really can't trust any source of information unless you've personally witnessed the accuracy of the information (i.e. it's your research, etc.) Information comes from imperfect humans, and you simply can't trust that 100% (if 10% in some cases). That's fundamental, not practical; if it turns out most of the info you research is accurate enough for your needs, which happens most of the time, you'll be okay for the most part.
Wikipedia is ultimately more helpful than it is harmful, but if you choose to use it for a single source of information where it's critical that the information be accurate, you HAVE to double check the info at least, if not simply use it to acquire other sources. Reason: There's no blaming Wikipedia and holding them responsible for your embarassing and possibly consequential mistake in your work.