Wikipedia Wars -- Lake Express Ferry

vhfer writes "Wikipedia Warfare has become the latest tool in the battle between rival lake transport systems. The Lake Express Ferry, which links Milwaukee and Michigan, bypasses Chicago traffic. The competing SS Badger runs from Manitowoc, an hour North of Milwaukee, to Ludington, Michigan. The article in the Milwaukee Journal details efforts by SS Badger supporters to highlight some of the delays and problems experienced by the Lake Express, in an apparent effort to divert some traffic to the Badger. Numerous edits to the article added links to news articles critical of the Lake Express, and some derided presidential candidate John Kerry's 2004 ride and the political value of it. The operators of the SS Badger deny responsibility for all the postings, and also say they aren't Internet savvy enough to alter a Wikipedia article."

Comments

Re:Problems on the fringes

[owlnation]

Wikipedia works rather well at the core...

No... maybe... how do you know for sure? There's simply never any guarantee of that. Perhaps a random page is accurate, perhaps it just looks plausible but is in fact dangerously wrong. I think the history pages are the most worrying. If, rather than a direct large scale act of vandalism, some interested group was to slowly over a number of years quietly change little things you could really distort a view of the world. Fox News anyone?

Depsite much publicity (and on /. too) about how low quality and unreliable many Wikipedia pages are, it never ceases to amaze me how many people link to it from these pages or are willing to trust it to prove their point. I guess most people here are university educated and really should know better. Personally, I would prefer to mod every post with a wikipedia link offtopic (unless obviously intended to be funny) - at least until such time as it is a trusted source.

As a so-called web 2.0 entity it seems to be praised where MySpace or similar would never be thus. I assume that this is due to the fact that the stated aims of Jimbo et al are non-profit, and the intention of many, though clearly not all, contributors is the genuine advancement of humanity.

Noble goals, but horrifically exploitable, and there is much evidence on Wikipedia that exploited is just what it sometimes is. This ferry thing being yet one more example of that proof. (The fact that ferries on Lake Michigan have doubled in numbers over the past 3 months notwithstanding.) The obvious exploits are all good and well, the danger is in the subtle errors or deliberate manipulations. We not spot them until serious damage is done, lives lost, governments overthrown - all possible as real history indicates. Again, Fox News anyone?

So, if this storm in a teacup about ferries was taking place through competing MySpace pages would /. run an article on it? I don't think so.

In truth MySpace is occasionally as valid a source for data as Wikipedia, similarly, as is a guy you met in a bar last night.

Thus please, please, stop taking Wikipedia seriously. At least until such time as its editors start taking the truth seriously.