iampowered: Wikipedia: An authoritative source?

This entry was posted in the following categories: News, Web services

Rituals, we all have them, and one of mine is to watch the nightly episode of "The Situation with Wikipedia Tucker Carlson." It's one of those ubiquitous news/current events shows that you see on all the 24 hour news cable channels. I always Tivo it and a particular segment on last night's show caught my eye.

The segment (Transcript) centered heavily on the opensource online encyclopedia called Wikipedia. Apparently, some controversy has been caused by an errant article that was posted to Wikipedia. The errant article mentioned that (former assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the 1960's) John Seigenthaler was once "thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby."

Now as Seigenthaler himself will tell you, this is completely false and no one then or now has ever alleged anything like that before this assertion was published on Wikipedia. The entry in Wikipedia has since been corrected, but according to Seigenthaler, it was on the site (and still on some site mirrors) for at least 132 days.

At first blush, I thought that Carlson (on his show) was being a little rough on the contributers to Wikipedia. After all, should one disgruntled volunteer contributer (anyone can edit items) cast a shadow on what is generally thought of as a fairly authoritative source for information? At second glance though, perhaps Carlson (and of course the wronged John Seigenthaler) have a point.

With the Wikipedia's veracity at stake, the developers have been discussing ways to ensure that articles meet a certain standard of "quality." One idea mentioned is to have certain articles flagged as being "stable" but as Ars Technica retorts:

"Having editors determine the veracity of an article runs contrary [to] the contributory process of content creation that is the ideal behind Wikipedia."

You can read more about this story by checking out the aforementioned transcript and reading the following USA Today news story that was spawned by this debate. It's pretty interesting stuff, especially for those of us that do tend to view the opensource online encyclopedia as an authoritative source for information.

USATODAY - A false Wikipedia 'biography'