Wikipedia – epic fail!
I know I’m somewhat beating a dead horse, especially people who come here… In the beginning, I tried to be helpful with the radio station entries, but the brain trust who came up with the Wikipedia concept lost control. Wikipedia has grown into trying to contain all knowledge about everything in every language, which means it is so huge that it can’t be edited reliably. The Radio Project took upon itself to throw out Wikipedia’s own rules since they had their own turf to police – most significantly “Wikipedia is not a directory”, Topics must be notable (“Having an FCC license makes a station notable”), and material being from reliable third party sources. The last item is the one that many radio hosts just don’t understand – you can’t edit the page about yourself (another no-no) and just write “facts” as you know them – you need independent reliable sources to back up your claims – and if somone has facts from reliable third party sources, you can’t just delete them because they embarrass you. You fight “bad facts” by finding other independent sources that reflect what you believe “truth” to be.
Anyhow, that’s not what provoked my exasperation today (I watch now as the radio pages mostly age and fill with useless outdated information)… I was hoping for the latest poll to point to Wikipedia for the definition of “Neoconservative”, which used to be pretty accurate and useful. But I went to the page, and someone has now inserted their own definition followed by “and the definition used to mean….” with the old information. The new “Definition” is from obscure politically motivated sources rather than the writing of the people who actually founded the movement.. The article has been marked as needing attention since April 2009 and nobody even cares enough to argue on the discussion page, probably because the pattern of past arguments over poitical topics always have the same outcome..
Noam Chomsky has may followers. Words need meaning, and its clear to me that part of the motivation of Wikipedia is to become the vehicle to rewrite history. With Google and Wikipedia, there is no reason to actually know anything.
(Has epic fail jumped the shark yet?)
