At a conference in Brazil (ISMB) this summer, an acquaintance complained how after noticing that a number of her students had the same error in their homework she tracked it down to Wikipedia. Having found the source of their confusion, she felt it incumbent upon herself to go in and edit the mistake in the Wikipedia entry. As a user of Wikipedia, I never cease to be amazed what a vast trove of information it is, vivid testimonial to our collaborative social insect behavior with over 5 million articles to date.
Wikipedia’s article count has shown rapid growth.
This week, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported an assistant professor, Alexander Halavais, deliberately posted a number of errors in Wikipedia in order to see how long it would take for them to be noticed, hypothesizing they would “languish online for some time”. Remarkably, the erroneous posts were corrected within 3 hours of being posted.
I mentioned this story at dinner, and my brother protested that the entry about him in Wikipedia (!) is INCORRECT, and would I change it? They have his date of birth wrong, and made him a year older. I just tried, and I CAN’T edit the part of the entry which has the misinformation!
Post Script: I checked the entry last night (since I was at my brother’s) and low and behold– the top part got corrected! I wasn’t sure if this was because even though I was unsuccessful at editing it myself I sent some sort of message into the — or if it was a synchronous correction. However my brother noticed that the entry at the bottom was still wrong, at which point I was sufficiently enabled I was able to make the correction myself…
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