Dec 11, 2005

The force for evil

The Economist once described the Wikipedia as 'the force for good'. Of course, where there is good, there must be evil - spawned from greed, malice or simple lack of understanding. See the dark forces gathering here. Even if this article is right and Wiki is safe, the court proceedings will still cost money - money which comes from our donations and should be used on improving the encyclopedia, not feeding the lawyers :(

Update: ZDNet has a good article on this.
See also Wikipedia take on this.

Update2: Wikipedia defends itself with transparency, Register vs Wiki

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Feeding Wikipedia with misinformation. That's new.

How does one validate information on a subject that is extremely obscure or simply doesn't have enough sources to check with?

Piotr Konieczny said...

Everything can be validated, the question is - how much time (and sometimes - money) are you prepared to spend on doing this?

Anonymous said...

Assume you have something that is nigh impossible to acutally confirm. How does Wikipedia treat that kind of information?

Also, is it better to have incomplete or misleading information than none at all?

Piotr Konieczny said...

MtG, I replied above. Everything should be verifiable. If it cannot be vefired, it may assumed to be false (fiction) and deleted.

Incomplete - yes. Misleading - no.

Anonymous said...

I still see a 'may' in your answer. Who decides whether to delete or not? And how?

I meant 'misleading' as in 'lacking an importnant bit of information that changes the whole meaning'.

Piotr Konieczny said...

Martin, check Wikipedia:Verifiability and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion.

 
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