The Guardian has a story about Wikipedia, in which the encyclopedia’s accuracy is examined by people the newspaper presents as experts on some of the reference site’s subjects. Wikipedia falls far short, though I doubt this would be news to anyone frequenting this board.
However, it’s amusing that The Guardian, with at least two glaring errors, is as guilty as the online encyclopedia can be: It speaks of the Wikipedia founders, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, as though there was only one, then — a cardinal sin — it fails to supply either name. This absence is all the worse because of the juicy quote at the top of the story by who it describes as the founder admitting that some of its entries are “a horrific embarrassment.”
The article assumes too much. It seems to be more of a sidebar to a main story that is nowhere to be found. It does not say that Wikipedia’s articles are not carved in granite and that any entry likely would be changed by the time the link is clicked, thereby leading to confusion on the part of any reader not knowing this and clicking a link.
One of the Guardian’s links (removed from the story just before this posting) had connected to a Register story, which has author Nicholas Carr writing of the Wikipedia entries on Bill Gates and Jane Fonda: “This is garbage, an incoherent hodge-podge of dubious factoids that adds up to something far less than the sum of its parts.”
The Register is hardly a paragon of error-free virtue. It can be as mistake-prone and as careless as any cavalierly written junior-high student’s leetspeak blog, and it mostly is. It has Carr examining two entries but writing “This is garbage” and “the sum of its parts.” Clearly, he is referring to one entry only. If I was not familiar with The Register’s history of laziness and abysmal writing, I might have assumed that Carr is lumping the two entries together. It’s likely that his input on the other entry lacked punch, so in torquing the story, one quote was made to fit both.
Page 2 of the story reinforces this impression. Wales refers to the Gates and Fonda entries in the plural (the [sic] is The Register’s):
This journalism-101 story, a grammatical and punctuation-challenged train wreck, points out that Wales misspelled embarrassment! Aside from the irony, it shows that communication with Wales was by written word, and that to bolster its arguments by adding a “[sic]” to a typo in what probably was an email, The Register had not yet begun to plumb the inch-deep depth of its righteous indignation.
Wikipedia’s credibility may be suspect, but regarding The Register’s, all doubt is removed.