Great post, thanks for the details on this. I’ve been researching this topic for a while and just believe that someone needs to come up with a “non Wikipedia result” search engine. I mention this on my blog for goodtagbadtag.com here

Thanks in advance to the programmers that would make it.

Ant

Your are wrong Google treats Wikipedia like it is a trusted source of information. Try adding the word information after a search. Google automaticly puts a wikipedia entry at the top.

I think Stephen Colbert covers this story best

No… unfortunately it is the *users* who treat Wikipedia like it is a trusted source of information. This is subtly mentioned by the reader above who indicates that Google would be lying if they altered Wikipedia’s page rank. I seem to see that this blogger misunderstands the workings of not only Wikipedia, but Google, too. The ‘web site marketing’ part of this site name makes it all clear, though… David is simply upset because his clients will never be more than #2, something he no doubt promises them more than.

I seem to remember that when I was growing up and writing papers, I had to find more than one source of information to support a claim. It also seems that if the professors who are failing these students have access to accurate information, then so do the students themselves.

Coincidentally, I have an old set of encyclopedias (from the late ’50s and early ’60s) that has an interesting entry under ‘tobacco’. After a brief description of the farming, distribution and use of tobacco and tobacco products, the article concludes by saying that ‘there is no evidence that tobacco use is harmful to those in good health.’ Anybody can buy^h^h^h subsidize an encyclopedia entry, apparently… and living 30 miles from Winston Salem, NC, I can promise - it happens.

The article tries to pin the blame on Wikipedia, but the problem it describes belongs to the internet itself. The real problem is that I can publish erroneous information, and you can access it. Wikipedia actually fixes the problem in that scenario by adding “and you can change it if it’s wrong or out of date or poorly spelled.” You can’t do that to my blog or my website, but you can do that to my Wikipedia entries. And if I’m persistent enough, I can edit your edits, and you can edit my edits to your edits, ad nauseum. Those edits to edits to edits, however, are all logged and ‘historied’ so that anyone visiting the page can see if the information is, at least, debatable.

So there’s a fundamental change underway, here, and Mr. Ogletree is obviously not ready for it. That’s understandable - my generation grew up having its information handed to it - interactive technology did not exist on the consumer level, but sounded vaguely like it would be pornographic. So, at one extreme, professors might just hand out “Fs” when they see ‘wikipedia.org’ in the citation, and at the other end of the spectrum, students might be carelessly ingesting words on a page, simply because they exist. I have to imagine that if a piece of data on Wikipedia is so erroneous as to earn the student a failing grade, the student was both careless and narrow in finding other sources of information. And if Wikipedia is the only source of information, what leg does the professor have to stand on?

So the philosophy is that those students who failed (by, no doubt, waiting until the internet was the only bookstore or library open) should update the offending Wikipedia pages with the correct information. I do, however, acknowledge that Wikipedia is quite incongruent with an institution that has people paying tens of thousands of dollars per year to be spoon-fed information - the university system would much rather have huge sums of money involved in anything ‘erudite’. Wikipedia is free in every sense of the word, and I’m afraid that some people just aren’t there yet. I suggest that, should the complainants pursue their whines, Mr. Wales refund them double their Wikipedia membership fees.

Mr. Ogletree, may I suggest that the internet is a ‘natural system’ and that from the short list of ‘trade based economy’ and ‘misinformation’, only one exists (for long) in natural systems. You will often see a mammal raise its fur to make itself look bigger when it is afraid, but you’ll never see one bargaining for its life with a predator by offering foraged berries. It may *seem* like it’s all about money, but any ‘web site marketing’ service is simply misinformation of a different flavor. The internet is a great leveler, and any efforts that you undertake to make someone’s page rank higher than it would naturally is much more dangerously deceptive than an erroneous Wikipedia entry.