Comments on: Trusted Wikipedia Project https://alex.halavais.net/trusted-wikipedia-project/ Things that interest me. Thu, 21 Sep 2006 22:50:51 +0000 hourly 1 By: theory.isthereason » The Trusted Wikipedia Project https://alex.halavais.net/trusted-wikipedia-project/comment-page-1/#comment-153161 Thu, 21 Sep 2006 22:50:51 +0000 http://alex.halavais.net/trusted-wikipedia-project/#comment-153161 […] Still, it doesn’t hurt to figure out a way to find that magic middle between both systems. Rather than to configure the user, configuring a better system allows for accurate information to be more accessible. This is where the Trusted Wikipedia project comes to play… Many people dismiss Wikipedia out of hand as a trusted source, precisely because it is written and edited by “anybody.” This differs, they suggest, from a newspaper, which is “fact checked,” or from an academic paper, which is “peer reviewed.” Over the last two years, I have chatted with a number of people about the possibility of peer reviewing Wikipedia “from the outside.” At Wikimania, a number of proposals were made–some of which are already under way–to make Wikipedia both a more credible and a more accurate source of information. The two, while complementary, are not necessarily identical. […]

]]> By: Ed Crowder https://alex.halavais.net/trusted-wikipedia-project/comment-page-1/#comment-153020 Thu, 21 Sep 2006 05:52:44 +0000 http://alex.halavais.net/trusted-wikipedia-project/#comment-153020 I’ll tell you something that happened the other day. My friend Wayne, who’s a bit of an artist, gets to telling me about this dead flying squirrel he’d found in his backyard and was storing in his freezer. But I’m close to 100 percent sure he’s making it up, and told him so in strong, Anglo-Saxon terms. Flying squirrels, I inform him matter-of-factly, only live in Indonesia. I ask him if it happened to be wearing goggles and traveling with a moose.

So he says, “All right, wise guy, let’s look it up.” “OK,” I tell him. We head upstairs, boot up the computer and fire up Wikipedia. I type in “flying squirrels” and sure enough there’s an entry. And damned if it doesn’t confirm that flying squirrels are, in fact, native to North America, lending credence to his story.

Later om, it occurs to me that it wouldn’t be at all uncharacteristic of Wayne to have concocted the whole thing ahead of time, and have created (or edited) the Wikipedia entry ahead of time to mess with my head. You used to be able to trust the folks at Britannica.

Sigh. It’s a strange world we live in.

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