Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Players only love you when they're playing
Just when I think that I need to get on the Wikipedia bandwagon, I read (again) about how easy it is for interest groups to manipulate information there. But now you can trace who's doing the editing — including the example of someone at Fox News editing the entry on one of Fox's enemies, Al Franken.

I've seen plenty of misspellings, misused punctuation, run-on sentences and other writing errors on Wikipedia. I've seen stranger things such as this statement from the entry on Steve Nicks, the Fleetwood Mac chanteuse:
During the 1992 U.S. presidential campaign, Bill Clinton used the Fleetwood Mac hit "Don't Stop" (written by Christine McVie) as his campaign theme song. The Rumours-era line-up of Fleetwood Mac reunited to perform the song at his 1993 Inaugural Gala, sowing the seeds for a later reunion album and tour. Rumors soon arose regarding the nature of the President and Nicks' relationship.
This was the first I had heard of a possible affair between Clinton and Nicks. No citation is provided. The Wikipedian solution to the problem is to edit this out, thus improving the quality of the online encyclopedia. The more we edit, the better it gets. OK, but what of all the people who have already read this entry and will never visit it again?

This and previous thoughts on Wikipedia here.
 
posted by Andy Bechtel at 2:22 PM | Permalink |


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