Yesterday, Jeff Jarvis, American journalism professor, on Twitter, had been imploring the contributors of Wikipedia to correct his date of birth on the Wikipedia entry on him. Finally, he says, someone did.
This made me wonder about the ‘wisdom of crowds’ belief that Wikipedia is supposed to epitomise in today’s world of information and the Internet. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not challenging Wikipedia as a source of inaccurate information (I had done that before and had to correct myself). After all, I have been told that Encyclopaedia Britannica, apparently, contains as many errors as Wikipedia does.
I’m merely contemplating if many people contributing to, and creating, news and information (as it is on the Internet today) is really better than news and information created by a single source (such as a traditional encyclopaedia or the traditional newspaper/TV). Does more and more people contributing to, and creating, news and information necessarily lead to more accurate news and information?
13 September 2009
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2 comments:
Well, I'm the only person apart from my mother who should be expected to know my birthday and so I think it says nothing at all about the crowd since my mom is not a Wikipedian.
Thank you for your comment on my blog. It is indeed an honour to receive a comment from Jeff Jarvis.
I was merely trying to point out that many minds creating information may not always be smarter than a single source of information. That, there are such things as facts and truth which can't be ignored.
The 'wikipedia entry error' idea was only a blog post starter.
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