[DerekinTurk]

"First, in a Nov. 29 op-ed piece in USA Today, a former administrative assistant to Robert Kennedy lambasted the free online reference work for an article that suggested he may have been involved in the assassinations of both Robert F. Kennedy and John F. Kennedy."

So this means that the left is in favor of free speech (even when the speech is incorrect) except when it makes them look bad??? To bad the media wont play it up that way. They will make it seem that some ultra-conservitive is trying to make the Innocent demos look bad.

[Wiz]

Wales, in a recent C-SPAN interview...insisted that his Web site is accountable and that his community of thousands of volunteer editors...corrects mistakes within minutes," former Robert Kennedy aide John Seigenthaler wrote in USA Today. and the are reverted in seconds by liberals and protected by liberal moderators. Hey Wales, your encyclopedia is nothing but a Wikipedia with NPOV meaning liberal's point of view, and Wikipedians meaning to be a liberal. Guess how many Encyclopedia editors claim the inaccuracy of your contents full of bias. Shut your site and get lost.

[Arkinsaw]

I am no fan of Wikipedia. But.....

Siegenthaler could have simply edited out the offensive part of his article rather than sitting and stewing over it for 4 months. The page that had the offending sentence has a button on it tht says "edit this page". He should have done it rather than cry and look for someone to sue.

That said, Wikipedia is good for two things.....trivia contests.....and to keep its editors from bothering people elsewhere on the net.

[Publius6961]

To critics of Wikipedia--which, in a spin on the open-source model, lets anyone create and edit entries--the news was further proof that the service has no accountability and no place in the world of serious information gathering.

Pretty much my position since I understood the "business model".

Anyone setting up such a service based on both its usefulness and the assumption that the users/editors will be 100% honest and not exploit and abuse the system is a fool...

[dawn53]

I get a kick out of Wikipedia. It is a sign of our times.

Anybody can write anything, and someone will take it as fact.

If folks understand what Wikipedia is and is not, then I see no harm, no foul.

Haven't the newscasters and journalists been doing the same thing for years, telling the "part" they want to, and leaving out the rest?

[Boundless]

Wikipedia: You can count on it being correct
until just before you read it.

[antiRepublicrat]

Wiki puts up a headline that tells you the veracity is in dispute whenever there is controversy over accuracy in the attached editing discussion for an article.

A FReeper here had it right once. He saw the Wiki on FR was left-leaning. He didn't complain, he just went in there and fixed it.

[Lazamataz]

Growing pains for Wikipedia

I, too, have groin pains.

[Doctor Stochastic]

Wikipedia is what happens without peer review.

[Taliesan]

I think Wikipedia is about as trustworthy as the average NYT news story or the average comment on Freerepublic. Which simply means that you understand when you read it that you are reading an introduction or one take on the issue and the writer is a human being with a viewpoint. If you are over 12 years old you have learned by now you NEVER use one source for anything; you ALWAYS read about 3 different viewpoints and mentally triangulate the truth, taking into account the perspective of all the writers you are reading, and using the neurons God gave you.

And if you aren't smart enough to deal with that, you need an information nanny. Which is what, I suppose, the Left is screaming about.

I'm endlessly amused by the MSM myth that you can read a news story and get, in that one story, THE TRUTH about something, because it was written by a (drumroll) PROFESSIONAL JOURNALIST who has a (drumroll) EDITOR. As if you get in journalism school some esoteric anointing that makes you ever after able to tell truth from fiction better than the common people, who suffer the disadvantage of just being educated in an actual subject.

They either want to think that way, or the complete opposite, which is that there is no such thing as truth, and these are the two lazy approaches to thinking. It's a simpering, nannyboy approach to reality.