Today John McCain announced he has picked Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. In its morning broadcast, NPR reported that McCain's choice showed up on Wikipedia (and the AP) before it had been officially confirmed as fact.
This isn't exactly an irregular event in wiki world, considering the content is created by millions of users, but it says a great deal about the power of the Internet. In the hours following the official announcement, Wikipedia users frantically updated and edited Palin's entry, adding nasty descriptive words after her name (I took a screenshot of one, but it's honestly so lowbrow I don't want to share it).
I use wikis as one of my first stop spots to learn about people and random topics, but I can't say I take anything I read as verifiable fact. How and when do you trust wikis?
on Yahoo! |
We studied the wikis and how relevant the information on them are in my internet civilization class when I was pursuing my Masters Degree. And well we found that most of the information on Wikipedia was edited and flagged within minutes if they were found to be wrong. We tested the system out by having a bunch of us in class just editing articles and seeing how fast they would be corrected and we were warned for inputing false information. On average, it usually took 2-5 minutes.