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Sure, "citizen encyclopediaism" isn't a real term, but either was "citizen journalism" at some point, and with Wikipedia...anything can be fact, and anyone can author an encyclopedia entry. Sure the facts are sometimes...totally false, but c'mon, even the Encyclopedia Britannica got Stalin’s birth date and the birth name of Bill Clinton wrong.
On Monday night's Colbert Report, the defender of truth himself praised Wikipedia for "wikiality", "the reality that exists if you make something up and enough people agree with you". He urged viewers to "find the Wikipedia entry on elephants and create an entry that stated their population had tripled in the last six months, a fact he freely stated to not know if it was "actually true," with his sidebar stating "it isn't." (See above clip from the show.)
Colbert has now been blocked from using the site. Though the site states, "This is being done to protect the actual Stephen Colbert from impersonation", one of the site admin's blogs states, "Yes, I am Wikipedia Tawker and yes, I blocked. That “joke” used way too much of my bandwidth, my poor Tawkerbot4 couldn’t keep up! In all, we ended up protecting 20 elephant related pages." He also adds, "Now, if Stephen Colbert is out there, I’m willing to appear on the show if you put me on report. I need one round trip airfare to New York for the taping but just give me a date and I’ll go." Of course you will.
The New Yorker recently published an article titled, "Know It All: Can Wikepedia conquer expertise?" mentioning the survey published by Nature which showed Wikipedia having four errors for every three of Britannica’s. We imagine that number is up now, especially with all those elephant entries.
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Gerald Cohen and I solved "the Big Apple," tracing the term to horseracing in the 1920s, then jazz in the 1930s. Wikipedia's "Big Apple" entry uses our information (free, of course).
While on vacation on July 18th, I found that someone had changed the Wikipedia "Big Apple" entry. Jazz was cited as the origin, and the horseracing explanation (officially explained by Mayor Giuliani when "Big Apple Corner" was signed into law) was now suddenly "another, less plausible explanation."
A friend of mine immediately changed the entry back to what it was, but that fact that you have to be on 24-hour Wikipedia alert and that people rely on Wikipedia is a little disturbing.
Finally!. Now thanks to Wikipedia be can affirm that the U.S. is a democracy, that we do not invade other countries on a whim, we do not torture people or bomb woman & children, there is no housing bubble and our Constitutional Rights are as healthy as ever. Did I say as healthy as ever?. I meant to say our Constitutional Freedoms are growing faster than the elephant population which has TRIPLED in the last 6 months!.
Thank you Wikipedia for allowing us to create our own alternate version of reality. And thank you GW Bush for inventing Wikipedia, after all, it's our president who taught us by example that "if you repeat a lie often enough it's bound to become believable!".
wasn't it Al Gore who invented the Internet in the 1990's, at least according to Al Gore.
It's not a lie, if you believe it
It's not a lie, if you believe it
Wikipedia is a big joke.
Most normal people, like myself, get run off of Wikipedia when trying to add little things like facts. I had two accounts hacked there because the cadre of the little über nerds with Asperger's Syndrome who actually are responsible for writing it got pissed off. I know a few other people who this happened to, which leads one to wonder about its security.
Wikipedia is like the theory that an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters can produce the complete works of Shakespeare if given infinite time, but in this case the monkey's have been replaced with unstable nerds and the complete works of Shakespeare with a random collection of information of dubious orgin. In fact, the whole thing seems to be written by obsessive compulsive young white male nerds from affluent western nations and reflects that viewpoint, despite claiming falsely to be "neutral" and "unbiased" - claiming you are fair and balanced doesn't work, just look at Fox News.
Many teachers and college professors prudently forbid its use, since they know it is not a reliable source. In many internet fourms, people who don't want to actually do real reasearch use the crutch of citing Wikipedia, depite the fact that information may or may not be true. Since there is no mechanism for real fact checking, inaccurate, false or misleading information can disseminate, because anyone can edit it and do so with no accountability except getting "banned" from the site, which is something that can be easily defeated. There is also no real management to compalain to if there is a problem and is in effect ancarchy. Wikipedia is just too disorganized to last in its current state - a collection of random information of dubious origin.
Wikiality: helping spread Stephen's version of truthiness.
I'm starting this site to make Stephen's vision and ideas a reality. The site shall reflect the facts and the world as Stephen sees them. Today is a great step forward for humanity.
To add to the din of Wikipedia discussion, an article by Marshall Poe in the September Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200609/wikipedia
That Al Gore myth is a pet peeve of mine. Here's a good links page on the topic. (And while I'm at it, Wikipedia, bitches!)
How naive do you have to be to believe that Gore would actually say that. (Though in my experience rabid conservatives will continue to parse his actual words as though they are some horrible lie.)
I think people use Wikipedia with false expectations. If you go into it understanding that entries can be edited by all users, you can appreciate it's true value: It is a good, quick source of GENERAL information on a topic. If you need more detail on a topic, everyone knows that takes a LITTLE MORE RESEARCH. I have benefited from this site many times. Stop being such haters!
Aloha
can anyone out there tell me what is the orgin of 'The Big Apple" for New York city?
Im originally a New Yorker but never knew where that term came from. Many thanks to whomever can email me a response
ciao, JMO