News is not good on the Wikipedia front. (Please, someone stop me if I start using battle metaphors to often around here…) Adam Curry has been doing some self-aggrandizing in terms of his Podfathership, and now there has been some character assisination going on that has really accentuated the Wikipedia problem. Because, you see, there are now a couple of seemingly reputable reference sites on the Internet that are snatching Wikipedia text verbatim (without human eyes) to answer questions people pose.
Oh boy.
…the bigger problem is that Wikipedia is so often considered authoritative. That must stop now, surely. Every fact in there must be considered partisan, written by someone with a confict of interest. Further, we need to determine what authority means in the age of Internet scholarship. And we need to take a step back and ask if we really want the participants in history to write and rewrite the history. Isn’t there a place in this century for historians, non-participants who observe and report on the events?
That is the critical question. What does authority mean in the age of Internet scholarship? (I just want to ask questions today, not attempt to answer them. I’m tired.)
And so the disruption goes…
UPDATE: See this NY Times Lesson Plan on the Wikipedia woes.
CNET has an update on some changes that Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder, is making to address these “growing pains.”
http://news.com.com/Growing+pains+for+Wikipedia/2100-1025_3-5981119.html?tag=nefd.lede
This is an interesting issue for me. I’ve found much of value on Wikipedia and even been a creator and editor. I recently went back to a page I created for Colonial American poet Edward Taylor and checked out the page’s history. I was dismayed to see that it had once been vandalized pretty badly, but heartened to see it was quickly fixed. But the issue Siegenthaler addressed is bigger. The fact is, there is no fact-checker general for Wikipedia, and it is all too easy for large errors to develop.
I had also noticed through simple Google searches that other sites were snatching Wikipedia text, too. I think that is rather spurious, but I’m not sure Wikipedia can do anything about it, since the whole idea behind the site is rather antithetical to copyright.