examining wiki

Our discussion about wikipedia’s today made me think about something that occurred this weekend. My friend was going to look up some information about a TV show, and the first place he went to was wikipedia. After reading it, we both pretty much just accepted what the wikipedia said as fact. Then I remembered that anyone can edit these things, and there is a reason why we are told not to use wikipedia in our classes. So we looked directly at the TV show website and sure enough, wikipedia had some information about some of the characters wrong. I know our guest speaker said today that a study shows wikipedia to be more accurate than encyclopedia Brittanica, but still how can we trust anyone? That is what we are doing with wikipedia, we are trusting anyone and everyone. We have no way of knowing if what we are reading is true or if it is biased opinion or flat out lie. In fact, I heard that political candidates were trying to change things on their wikipedia that they didn’t like to make themselves look better. The idea of an information source that everyone can be a part of is a novel idea, but I think before we just all jump on board to the wiki craze that we take a step back and make sure that the flaws aren’t going to be too big. I know if there was a page up about me I would edit it if I didn’t like some of what it said.