Wikipedia and Academe
You might like to track down the article in this week's (8/11/06) Australian Higher Ed section (from the Chronicle of Higher Education) about the pros and cons of Wikipedia from the academic point of view. The debate rages on about how accurate it is...The following is the beginning of the article, and it goes on to mention the Nature review comparing Wikipedia with Brittanica. "Source of contention for experts
AN assistant professor of communications at
Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, Alexander Halavais, has spent
hours and hours wading through Wikipedia, which has
become the internet’s hottest information source.
Like thousands of his colleagues, he has
turned to the open-source encyclopedia for timely information and
trivia; unlike most of his peers, he has, from time to time,
contributed his own expertise to the site.
Mischievously, two years ago he hatched a
plan to undermine the site’s veracity, which had gone largely
unchallenged by scholars.
Adopting the pseudonym Dr al-Halawi and
billing himself as a ‘‘ visiting lecturer in law, Jesus College,
Oxford University’’, Halavais slipped 13 errors into various
Wikipedia
articles. He knew that no one would check his persona’s
credentials: anyone can add material to the encyclopedia’s entries
without having to show proof of expertise.
Some of the errata he inserted, such as a
claim that abolitionist Frederick Douglass had made Syracuse, New
York, his home for four years, seemed entirely credible. Some, like
an Oscar for film editing that Halavais awarded to
TheRescuersDownUnder , an animated Disney film, were more obviously
false and easier to check......"
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