^NOT SO SASSY^

The free online encyclopedia Wikipedia is a democratically decided database that has been open to abuse, but the advent of WikiScanner has uncovered a web of deceit and misinformation.

Wikipedia was created in 2001 and has since grown as the online phenomenon that apparently allows the truth to be managed democratically.; but over the past years it has also been exposed as a real-life “Ministry of truth”.

Over two years ago, various media sources reported that the open-access encyclopaedia Wikipedia was about as accurate as Encyclopaedia Britannica, at least for science -based articles. This was the result of study of the journal Nature, which chose scientific articles from both encyclopaedias accross a wide range of topics and sent them for peer review. The reviewers just found 8 serious errors. Of those 4 came from each site. They also found a series of factual errors , omissions of misleading statements . That in itself a staggering conclusion which average out to 2.92 mistakes per article for Britannica and 3.86 for Wikipedia, or three versus four mistakes. That, of course, is not “as accurate” as the newspapers reported — thus, showing misleading statements in the newspapers’ headlines.

Trust cannot be guaranteed and hence, the best, Wikipedia comes with a few blemishes. George W. Bush’s biography was so frequently changed  — often to include name calling and “personalized opinions” on his policies that his and other and a small other entries have to be locked and they only authorized  users were allowed to edit them. Innocent enough; perhaps even funny.

Still, is Wikipedia’s score proof positive that the Internet is more than just a bundle of conspiracy theory and pornography sites, and that the combined efforts of Internet users actually work to create a knowledge base? Perhaps. Wikipedia allows anyone - anyone - to go in and add, change or delete anything in the encyclopaedia. Wikipedia is therefore an exercise in trust: it hopes that its users come there with the best of intentions.