August 16th, 2007 at 1:49 pm (Unschooling Life)
I love Wikipedia. I really do. But deep down, I knew this was going on, and it’s nice to have proof.
Morning Edition, August 16, 2007 · You might have suspected it, and ignored it until now in your online life: Wikipedia isn’t the most reliable reference. It’s just often the first source to come up when you do an online search. |
If you follow the IP address trail, you’ll see that often the editors of an entry are “interested parties,” not just encyclopedia nerds who want to make sure the facts are straight. |
The trail to wiki-understanding was forged by Virgil Griffith, a California Institute of Technology grad student. He created a database called the Wikipedia Scanner, a search tool that traces the comments and edits on Wikipedia entries back to their source IP address. The once-anonymous writers behind the entries are no longer quite so anonymous. |
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