Alex Foster

Aunty examines Wikipedia

By | Fri 6th March 2009 - 1:50 pm

An interesting piece on the BBC website examines Wikipedia for accuracy

After a slightly outrageous start, the piece settles down into a reasonably balanced look at the internet’s famous anyone-can-edit encyclopaedia.

And whilst errors remain, by and large the biggest mistakes are corrected reasonably quickly, and intentional vandalism overturned almost immediately.

Of particular note to Liberal Democrats will be bizarre quotes about Nick Clegg – now removed. There’s also a long and intriguing section about Martin Horwood MP’s entry on the site:

Liberal Democrat MP Martin Horwood was alarmed to discover his Wikipedia entry, which in keeping with the conventions of the site was not written by him, had been altered in a way he believed would harm his chances of retaining his seat.

Goodness, whatever was said?

And finally, this article came to our attention because it quotes one of the Team:

Mark Pack, the Liberal Democrats’ internet guru, argues that the site had a much better track record than most newspapers, when it comes to corrections.
“Wikipedia is probably more prone to errors than other sources, but it is also much more prone to correcting errors,” he says.
But he adds: “There is a tendency to only see it as acceptable to remove information if it is factually incorrect or extremely trivial.”

UPDATE: Via the medium of Twitter (naturally) we learn the views of Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales:

@markpack good quote in the bbc story – you are right about the strengths – and weaknesses of wikipedia bios

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One Comment

  • Cheltenham Robin 6th Mar '09 - 6:20pm

    Martin Horwood’s entry was clearly being changed by tories who kept adding references to the tory PPC.

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