Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Hey Dave --
Sorry for the long comment here but there's an interesting informed response to the Wiki** phenomenon in the current issue of Current Cites, a e-newsletter of particular value to librarians.
The newsletter points to something in the [new] Red Herring magazine but then the newsletter authors go on to say:

Wikipedia is one of those venerable Internet resources that's always just sort of been there. A noble undertaking to create a free online encyclopedia, it is somewhat of a mixed bag, as any information professional will tell you. Some of the entries are eloquently written and contain high quality information. Other stuff...well...as this article points out, the Wikipedia has become "the latest battleground in the presidential election as users...squabble over entries related to President George W. Bush and Democratic challenger John Kerry, the junior senator from Massachusetts." Since anyone is free to edit a Wiki article, you can see the potential for problems galore. And it's not just election-related material that is under a cloud. "Some users have even deliberately inserted errors into Wikipedia entries to test how quickly users can detect and remove them." Ugh! . . . A friend passed along a legal document just this past week in which a real live sitting judge actually cited the Wikipedia. Long story short, editors may be coming to the Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales, president of the Wikimedia Foundation, "said that next year he will begin using editors to review the web site's content for accuracy and allow users to rate contributions to the encyclopedia
for their quality."