Aces Full of Links

That's an amazing coincidence. Nice detective work.

I've become a fan of Wikipedia and I find myself turning to it more often to get a quick primer on a subject before investigating it further. I haven't been able to come up with good ways to improve the edit system to avoid the type of abuse you mentioned. The only solution may be more eyes reading each entry over time.

We love Wikipedia in our house, and the kids visit often. When I say it is flawed, I don't think it's fatally flawed. But many people are reconsidering the usefulness of "collective" knowledge. There is a built-in level of inaccuracy, conflict and abuse. But what reference is perfect?

I like the way Wikipedia has tried to mitigate problems of fast-changing news and over-editorialization. It's often that Wikipedia is the first place to go for some fact or other, especially ones you once knew but just can't remember.

Oh, and I swear you came to mind, Mike, when we were trying to get to the bottom of this. Old times!

It is an interesting problem. I like the democratization of knowledge, if that's the right term. Just take, for example, (if the wound isn't too fresh), the situation with the fire in Fall River. There was a lot of inaccurate reporting, possibly prejudiced reporting, and reporting to turn something into a sensationalist story to sell it. I think I'll even throw in the word "lazy," since rather than tell the story as it was, or find something meaningful in the story, the news reporters fell back on the same questions, the same ideas -- things people are familiar with. Again to sell. News for the proles. It's inexcusable.

The news media certainly isn't unbiased and they're most definitely not accurate. Every single time I've known a story personally, with absolutely no exceptions, the news media has gotten an actual fact wrong. That's not accounting for the personal prejudices of the reporter, or the way the story "came off," its spin, its focus, whatever you want to call it. I'm just talking about plain facts! "Professionals" can't get the plain facts straight.

News should be taken out of these people's hands, and history books should be democratized for posterity. Wikipedia should be frozen and preserved at stages, so we have a history of what people actually believed at the time things were happening, and then let the changes in society change the entries as we move into the future, but preserve the old for the history "books."

It's true. Most times that I've been personally familiar with a story reported in the media, I've found inaccuracies. The people who write and collect the news are human and often overworked, like the rest of us.

I wouldn't say that blogs and so-called "new media" do better. Depending on the individual, you can't consider most blogs to be decent informaiton sources because bloggers in general don't have the research resources or time to hunt things down. Once in a while, though, a blogger might have a unique perspective, an interesting opinion, or sufficient motivation to get to the bottom of something. So, overall, they contribute something to the marketplace of information.

"Caveat Emptor" is in full effect. You're confidence level should still be a lot higher in AP stories, for example, (professional standards are, and should be, in effect) than something from a blog or from a quasi-news "new media" organizations like WorldNetDaily.

I wasn't making the point that blogs are better than newspapers. I guess my point was that more unique voices is better. I don't trust anybody who's trying to sell me something.

Chuck Norris vs. Wikipedia would be cooler.

I agree. I just wanted to bring blogs into the discussion, since they're increasingly becoming a source of information. I don't really like the term "new media," but maybe that's a post for another day.

His campaign said they were going to sue Wikipedia and Congressman Frank.

*giggle*

Good times ...

I was hoping to find that mentioned online somewhere so I could link to it. But Morse doesn't even seem to mention this on his website or blog.

Wikipedia certainly beats Googling something and trying to find a website that doesn't use the Comic Sans font. Thankfully Wikipedia entries often appear at the top of search results and the Firefox extension Googlepedia also helps.

Has googling (lowercase version) entered the dictionary yet?

Like dmoz I'll probably contribute more to Wikipedia as I become comfortable with it. I signed up for a user account and so far I'm limited my edits to correcting typos, bad grammar and page formatting.

And even though I double checked that comment a typo slipped through. Argh, irony.