ResourceBlog Article: Death by Wikipedia: The Kenneth Lay Chronicles

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Sunday, 9th July 2006

Death by Wikipedia: The Kenneth Lay Chronicles

Death by Wikipedia: The Kenneth Lay Chronicles

From the article:

Lay's death on Wednesday illustrates the problem, as chronicled by the Reuters news service, which watched the Wikipedia article on Lay evolve with alarming speed and wildly inaccurate reporting...What does all of this tell us? That Wikipedia's greatest strength is its greatest weakness...An encyclopedia written from many points of view should, in theory, help eliminate that flaw. Further, as well-girded in research as encyclopedia authors are, there are countless experts on thousands of topics that know more than the Wikipedia authors; every topic has its fetishists, and thank goodness. If the goal is the ultimate compilation of truth-tested facts, Wikipedia could be a powerful tool.

+ In "theory" as the writer points out is not the same as reality.

+ One might ask if an encyclopedia entry is the place for breaking news to be shared? In these situations, a better idea might be to simply point to articles (as they hit the wires) from recognized news sources or gathered by top-notch sources like The Paper Chase that at the same time also link to related documents.

+ To some degree the Wash Post writer (without knowing it) might also be talking about the once beloved but now (for the most part) poor Open Directory Project. Where the original goal was to create the world's largest and most useful directory of web resources, the ODP has become a spam generator, infrequently updated (in many cases), and the like. The top-level Baseball page shows it was last updated on December 9, 2005. The actual MLB page does a bit better but still hasn't been updated in four months. The top-level Actors and Actresses page on December 25, 2005. The page outlining links for the Philadelphia metro hasn't seen an update since September 2005. To be fair, other sections do a much better job of updating. Of course, another issue is: While the official DMOZ site is being updated are sites that basically take DMOZ data and repackage it updating as each page is updated?

+ For a few more thoughts about Wikipedia, see this recent RSS post from three weeks ago.

Source: Washington Post (Discovered via Findory)S

UPDATE: Quick note to point out that the Marquis Who's Who (via Gale's Biography Resource Center) has a special note with a link to a CNN article about Mr. Lay's death. The same is also true with the narrative biography available via the Gale Bio Resource Center. This database is available free (from home or office via many libraries).

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