My dear old mum is excited by the possibilities of the internet, but a little wary of the new technology. So today I decided to spend a little bit of time showing her some of the exciting stuff in Wikipedia. She’s the type of person who is interested in everything, but had a limited formal education, and is now a voracious autodidact. Wikipedia would be a fantastic resource for her.
In searching for terms in which we both had some interest, I showed her the Morris dancing page, only to find it had been “vandalised”. Anyone can edit Wikipedia. Some prat had edited it in the last week or two with lots of standard anti-Morris type jokes (the Morris equivalent of “where’s your other wheel” or “where’s the circus?”).
Result, mother now considers it “proven” that the internet is more trouble than it’s worth, and that Wikipedia is wholly unreliable. A caution has become a prejudice.
Wikipedia is one of the glories of the internet: a co-operative venture in which people share their knowledge and time to produce a free resource for all. To vandalise it is not only puerile, but also irresponsible and antisocial. We in the west are so lucky to have all this stuff (you don’t get uncensored internet in China, and you’d never see a computer in your life in the horn of Africa). The people who did this are imbeciles.
wiki’s by their very nature aren’t reliable sources. vandalisms of them are at least obvious. changed a few minor dates/facts to be incredibly incorrect is a much dirtier trick. the wiki’s can be neat but there the tip of the iceberg for information. i use them (unless they’re nerd related) for a starting place to figure out where else to go for information. i’d suggest steering her towards more official type places. teach her some google and she’ll be amused for years.
I like to use Wikipedia and according to the British journal “Nature” it’s as reliable on science as the Encyclopedia Britannica, see this. I don’t take anything as fact though (I’m sceptic) so Wikipedia’s no different and you really have to look at lots of other resources as well, which is what the Internet has, both good and bad. The first thing I look at on a Wiki page is it’s history and who’s contributed, it’s easy to go back to a pre vandalised/edited edition.
On a recent page I looked at it was a disputed Neutral Point Of View (NPOV) as it was thought to be one sided? The history showed it had been edited by someone to remove/change controversial information relating to possible corrupt police activity. Some more searching revealed claims that there was evidence that the police edited the page themselves (a simple IP traced back to them, clever plod )
BTW the IP that was used to edit the Morris dancing page was 80.0.79.115 [spc1-reig1-3-0-cust114.asfd.broadband.ntl.com] so the computer used was probably around Reigate in Surrey. That’s not to say the person who did it was there using that computer but it is likely. More investigation could probably find them, though you’d need the help of NTL!!!
The wikis can be used for less-than-moral things, as is evident here, but I routinely use the site for homework issues, involving things that would be obvious if were edited (chemistry labs mostly), and I’ve never had a problem with it there.
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