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Interesting story on Wikipedia and Ken Lay

Discussion in 'Anything goes' started by Dude, Jul 5, 2006.

  1. Dude

    Dude Well-Known Member

    Saw this on Fark. Interesting to see how Wikipedia operates with breaking news and how quickly bad information gets posted and reposted on there.

    Kudos to whoever at Reuters thought it would be a good idea to monitor this.

    http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsarticle.aspx?type=internetNews&storyid=2006-07-05T195309Z_01_N05296006_RTRIDST_0_OUKIN-UK-ENRON-LAY-WIKIPEDIA.XML&src=rss

     
  2. Dude

    Dude Well-Known Member

    Uh they didn't. I reposted it twice. Fixed it. Sorry. :-[
     
  3. markvid

    markvid Guest

    Drudge originally said suicide. It probably took off from there.
    It's kind of sad how many people take that piece of garbage at his word.
     
  4. dixiehack

    dixiehack Well-Known Member

    How bad would it suck to get assigned to the Wikipedia updates beat at Reuters?
     
  5. Ben_Hecht

    Ben_Hecht Active Member

    Fudge is Fudge . . . hey, a broken clock's right, twice a day . . . nice links, though . . .
     
  6. Pastor

    Pastor Active Member

    Wikipedia, as noted, can be edited by anyone. If I wanted to make an edit, I could call up an entry on President Bush and edit it to say that he was recently visiting Michael Jackson's ranch. If you were reading the entry and hit refresh quickly enough, you would see my edit.

    There are people that are alerted to certain entries. These people look at the edit and then determine whether to keep it, by learning of its factual nature, or deleting it, recognizing the bullshit.

    Wikipedia has a ton of information and is a great source for receiving an introduction to a subject. It, of course, is not the end-all.

    If you look at the timeline presented, it seems like someone loaded up the entry and just hit refresh a bunch of times. This would allow certain things to be presented without Wikipedia's proper editors overlooking the factual nature of the information. This is backed up with the statement: Its Web site warns users that "newer articles may still contain significant misinformation, unencyclopedic content, or vandalism." This is a statement that appears when a document is edited and the edit isn't yet approved by those made officially in charge.
     
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