Five ways Wikipedia beats newspapers January 11, 2009
Posted by Bertalan Meskó in Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Web 2.0, Wikipedia.trackback
Joe D at Cotch.net inspired by Bora Zivkovic came up with a nice list of 5 reasons why Wikipedia can be better than newspapers.
1. Wikipedia avoids weasel words. It attributes statements to their sources, rather than to “some people say”. Can you imagine a newspaper surviving five minutes with such a policy?
2. When somebody hoaxes Wikipedia, the article quickly gets investigated and deleted within three weeks (and yet this case is held up as an example of Wikipedia’s unreliability). When somebody hoaxes the mainstream media, they carry on credulously reprinting the press releases five years later.
3. Wikipedia has a policy against plagiarising newspapers. Judging from the amount of times I’ve blurted “hey — I wrote that!”, while reading The Metro on the tube*, the reverse policy doesn’t apply.
4. You can correct mistakes in Wikipedia. You cannot correct mistakes in the Daily Telegraph, even if you were the subject expert quoted in the item.
5. Wikipedia is not about to go bankrupt.
As an administrator in the English Wikipedia, all I can say is let’s go and edit a medical entry you think you know more than a few lines about. These links may help you where to start:
Further reading:
lol
it was going to go “bankrupt” a few days ago when people from around the world chose to “bail it out”.
Wait! Who was the idiot that said wikipedia was going to go bankrupt??? I missed that.
I think he was referring to the current epidemic of American daily newspapers going bankrupt.
In any case, AFAIK Wikipedia can’t go bankrupt — it has no assets or debts. On the other hand, the Wikimedia Foundation (the umbrella organization which supports Wikipedia & its related projects) *could* go bankrupt, although so far they are taking in much more money than they are spending.
Geoff
A couple of weeks ago wikipedia asked their users to donate 6 million dollars to cover their expenses in 2009.
Good manners by the way.
I say give them all American Trillions printed on Good ‘ol paper by Uncle Sam…..It may actually be worth less than a Krona in about a year or two…..Credit swaps and Bernie Madoff can do us in too……
-Steve
http://www.thegenesherpa.blogspot.com
[Citation needed]
lol
Terrible nonsense.
It’s a matter of apples and oranges — if apples were professionally produced, labor-intensive products, and oranges were unreliable online collections of poorly written notes (most of which are sourced to newspapers).
#6. Wikipedia isn’t a dying media.
Wikipedia has become a household name and an institution. I think of conducting my searches Wikipedia-less and I get a headache and start shaking…
Wikipedia will not be going bankrupt any time soon. If I remember correctly Wikipedia had a goal of six million they reached with this money and more to come, Wikipedia is doing well. Wikipedia also beats the newspaper, because for newspaper to be printer it needs paper and paper is trees and we need these things for oxygen. Without trees we die with out the newspaper we save trees slightly more.
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