Squonk wrote
Good Stuff
In fact at my Wife's School they have forbidden Wikipedia as a reference for all projects. ?
The trouble is not Wikipedia per se. The trouble is people what people choose to put on the record. The good thing about Wikipedia is that anybody can add to it. The bad thing about Wikipedia is that anybody can add to it. I've done some work on a couple of Wikipedia entries. I have tried to make sure that there's an attribution for everything I add, EG to a published biography or a magazine interview that is available on line. Wikipedia recommends that everything be attributed in this way, but they can't police every entry every hour of the day.
I did quite a bit of tidying up and providing of cites for the Wikipedia entry on Richard Thompson, but that doesn't mean that micheivous people can't add details about the amount of masturbation he engages in each day (this happened) or that somebody cannot simply weave urban legends into the greater fabric of the article.
People don't check things these days, or even think about them for a few seconds to see if they make sense. Look at the amount of junk e-mail that gets circulated - don't the people forwarding this stuff bother to think about it first?
The problem is not Wikipedia. The problem is us. The Internet offers a lot of great tools for publishing or sharing information (this forum being a good example), but it's people who decide what to publish and what to accept at face value.
You shouldn't believe it just because you read it on the net, but you shouldn't believe it just because you read it in the Sunday Times either.
