Angie: In a speech at the University of Pennsylvania, Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, said he gets ten emails a week from students grousing that, after citing the user-edited pedia as source material, they were rewarded with failing grades.
Apparently, Wiki gets no respect from teachers or professors. It’s no wonder.
The hit-and-run editing method used to keep the compendium growing makes it little more than a collection of untrustworthy trivia.
Last December, Wales conceded that anonymous editing was probably not good and he’d be putting a stop to the practice… in new articles.
That leaves existing entries, which can still be edited anonymously and old articles wouldn’t be changed.
The huge tome has a history of being littered with bogus information.
Among the victims of biographical vandalism are John Siegenthaler who was falsely accused of involvement in Robert Kennedy’s assassination and Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg who learned from his Wiki bio that he’s a pedophile who served time in prison.
By the time Siegenthaler’s made-up bio was corrected, the information had spread across the web. The damage to his reputation will probably never be repaired.
For his part, Wales says he wants to spread the word that students shouldn’t be using Wikipedia for serious classwork. But he doesn’t feel sorry for them.
He says when he ponders the complaints from college students he thinks, “For God sake, you’re in college; don’t cite the encyclopedia.”
Especially the Wikipedia’d version.
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