Friday 4 March 2011

Wikiseedier

Well, here I am as usual, thinging late on a Friday. I figured I would go with option B and have a fiddle with a wiki, so why not be ambitious and go with the big daddy, Wikipedia. As I try to warn students in info literacy sessions, the theory of crowdsourcing is great, but everybody should engage their brain and question the authority of what they are reading. As Jimmy Wales (one of the founders) said in a recent Guardian interview:

"You shouldn't really use Wikipedia as the sole source for anything, ever. You shouldn't use anything as the sole source for anything, in my view." 

 There are legendary tales of academics deliberately planting plausible disinformation in wikipedia articles to see how much comes back from students. And there are of course the irritations caused by jokers. Here, for example, is what the Wikipedia entry for Wikipedia said for a while on October 9th, 2010:

NEVER USE WIKIPEDIA BECAUSE RETARDS LEIK MEEEE CAN EEEEEDIT IT LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL'''Wikipedia''' is a Free content free,Some versions, such as the English language version, contain non-free content. World Wide Web web-based, collaborative writing collaborative, multilingualism multilingual encyclopedia project.....


Anyway, being a good citizen, I just edited the entry for Warwick Arts Centre to add a couple of touches.

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