“Waterborne diseases are caused by stupid things like pathogenic microorganisms which are directly transmitted when contaminated fresh water is consumed.” -Wikipedia
I jest not. That was the first line of the article on waterborne diseases this afternoon. On an unrelated note, did you know that Polish is the fourth largest Wikipedia edition?
Fixed. It took me two clicks to find that the article had been vandalised, and another two clicks to undo the vandalism.
Yeah… at least wiki vandalism never lasts too long.
The thing about Wikipedia is that it is quick and easy to find information that is usually based upon truth. I am very critical of the information and don’t use it as my final source for reports or anything. The thing is, when researching a massive subject like a country, it helps to know a good place to start. When I researched Uganda for my Econ final project, I used Wikipedia as my starting point to get a good idea of what I was dealing with and then went to other sources such as the Bank of Uganda and so on.
Wikipedia has made efforts to improve the quality of the information published there. When it was just getting started and had growing infamy, anyone could edit it, and I distinctly remember someone writing a rant on the article for Leia Organa Solo that was all about how mad this person was that they couldn’t post pictures of her in her Jabba the Hutt slave girl bikini because some fundamentalist Christian would delete it. Now people who want to edit an article must register and their revisions aren’t immediate until they’ve been a member for a certain period of time. New members’ revisions go under review by longtime members.
Although… I did do a spoof report on my “Egyptian” god, Wikipedia, the god of fraud. It got Mr. Clark to use sources other than Wikipedia for our reading material. Our class made a consorted effort to prove just how inaccurate the information was by getting in front of the class and doing our oral reports and explaining what reliable sources said versus what Wikipedia said. I think that our class had almost as much fun bashing Wikipedia as we did actually paying attention to what we were learning in Eastern Thought (like the fact that Istanbul has oil wrestling; a sport where overweight men of prestige reach into each others’ underwear for better grip.)
So long and thanks for all the fish,
De Facto