17 Jan 07
Wikipedia Internet
I have no doubt that my degree would have been harder to get were it not for the existence of Wikipedia, there is in fact a Facebook group called "All my medical knowledge came from Wikipedia", which states;
"Every ounce of medical knowledge we have was obtained from Dr. Wikipedia. She's quick, intelligent, always available to answer our questions, and best of all.... she NEVER pimps us."
It is the greatest tool in the fight against essays; University students worldwide know the truth in that. I have been using Wikipedia for many years, and have written quite a few articles for the site, and edited many more.
My articles:
- The Newly Discovered Casebook of Sherlock Holmes Roy Hudd and the fellow Huddliners move to 221B Baker Street.
- The Sofa of Time The short-lived BBC Radio 4 series from Nick Frost, and Matt King.
- MacHeist
MacHeist was a six week long Macintosh community event which ran at the end of 2006 and raised US$200,000 for charity. The online event was a series of puzzles in which visitors to the site were provided with cryptic clues to decipher. Once completed, the player would receive Mac shareware applications as a reward.
I wrote the article, mostly because no one else had. After a few days of some constructed criticism from the MacHeist community, I was rather pleased with the end result and took a photo, proud of my contribution to Wikipedia... Little did I know things would change.
I got a selection of nasty messages from unknown individuals, it was nominated for deletion twice, and suffered an assortment of vandalism including:
"Originally an invite-only event, it later became open to the entire gay Mac community."
"The online event was a series of homosexual puzzles in which visitors to the site were provided with cryptic clues to decipher or track down obscure websites to retrieve details to send back to MacHeist in exchange for butt sex. Once completed, the player would receive the Mac holy gaynigger seed deposited from Steve Jobs himself."
"MacHeist was a six week long butt f-ing event which ran at the end of 2006 and raised $200,000.00 for charity."
What amazed me was the sheer speed at which the vandalism was corrected, and not by me. I checked this out, and on the Paris Hilton article, it took just less than 5 minutes from someone writing:
"Paris Hilton is now married to britney spears. they wed on the 1st of january."
back to the original...
"Paris Hilton is an American socialite, singer, actress and fashion model."
Now the belief that everything on Wikipedia is 100% true is clearly stupid. The site is open for anyone to edit, and if I wanted to say that Tony Blair was the love-child of Princess Leia and Sherlock Holmes I could, but I suspect it wouldn't say on the site very long. Nature, (one of the oldest scientific journals), conducted an investigation into the accuracy of Wikipedia vs the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Remarkably after looking at 42 articles, according to Nature;
"only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia... But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively."
For an open Encyclopaedia who's authors are unpaid members of the great unwashed that's a feather in the cap for Wikipedia and a rather damming verdict on Britannica's copy-checkers. Ultimately you can't trust Wikipedia as your only source of information, but as I discovered, the crap doesn't hang around long. For more information about Wikipedia, and the future of it, you may want to listen to an interview with founder Jimmy Wales, on the Simon Mayo program on BBC Radio Five Live, last Monday.
Note: My earlier comment about using Wikipedia for my degree was not an admission to plagiarism. I never copied from Wikipeida, it was a source of reference and research. Just wanted to make that clear, I don't want my degree stripped from me, my mum is too proud of my Graduation photo.