If you’ve read my blog for any amount of time, you’ll know that I often link to Wikipedia. I was cruising around Slashdot a little bit ago and saw a quick entry wondering if Wikipedia was really authoritative. Apparently somebody dismissed Wikipedia because it’s not a “real” encyclopedia. For those of you who don’t know, unlike, say, Britannica, Wikipedia has no staff that scour the world for facts, make sure those facts are correct, and then put those facts into their encyclopedia. The way it works is that anyone, anyone in the world, can hop on Wikipedia and create, edit, or delete entries. You might think this is just asking for trouble, but the idea is that if most of the population is good, and everyone has power over everyone else, then the bogus entries or obvious vandalism get corrected or deleted relatively quickly. However, this guy decided to actually check to see just how fast a bogus entry gets corrected. Somebody else tried the same experiment, which is to insert bad data and see how fast it gets changed or deleted. That guy found that it was gone within a couple of hours. However, the first guy wanted to be more subtle. He made a series of edits over a period of many days, adding facts that seemed plausible but were, upon further research, wrong. At the end of his experiment period, not one of his bogus entries had been corrected and he had to remove them all himself.
This is interesting because we believe what we read when it sounds like fact. Coming from a source like Wikipedia, which looks authentic, we’re even more likely to believe what it says without thinking twice or Googling a little bit more. Does this present a problem? Perhaps, but I think not. A piece of information is only true as long as it holds up under scrutiny: If you’re looking for Phillipsburg, PA, and you go to US 233 and Route 504 and find that it’s not there, you’re likely to go and change Wikipedia (after you find your way back to civilization). If the information is bogus often enough, the source loses credibility and no one believes it anyway. If enough people get burned by the incorrect information, either it changes or everyone looks somewhere else. Of course, it’s entirely possible that if the data you’re looking for is obscure enough, no one will have noticed it’s wrong, and you won’t know either because there aren’t enough sources to check against.
Also, there’s a really interesting interview with Greg Joswiak, VP of Hardware Product Marketing for Apple, up over at MacCentral.