the IDIOT

wikipedia remains both the best and worst of recent information experiments, testament to the core failure of the average human — neurotic disinclination to question bullshit when presented with the desired wrapping.

shallow wikipedia cheerboys — many of which have obviously never edited heavily at the site — point to a study which supposedly tested accuracy of wikipedia articles against encyclopedia britannica. instead of noting the obvious — that wikipedia normally sucks ass — they wave this study around and get brother fools to fall for their distortion, ignoring entirely that the study compared only select scientific articles — cut and dried topics that attract accurate geek editors and little debate. step outside that tight set and you find untold gigabytes of dreck — horrible writing infested with snippet disease (no owner of the whole), opinion dressed as absolute, and sourceless drivel by the boatload. with the popularity of wikipedia, garbage in becomes garbage propagated. wikipedia lies are now “truth”, more widely promulgated than truth, often simply because of the sloppy inaccuracy of a single “contributor”. admins are sure to miss most of these fuckups, but damned if they’ll allow a “personal attack” on a discussion page.

good example of the complete syndrome: in articles related to christopher mccandless (the subject of the book and movie Into the Wild), lat/long coordinates are offered for the deserted bus where he spent most of his time in the alaskan wilderness. though off target by approximately ten miles — horrendous error given the precision of the method — they remain. some shyster dummkopf (or prankster) plugged those numbers in and they took off, across wikipedia and thus the internet. wikipedia’s wrongness is parroted almost immediately via automation at sites such as answers.com, then becomes the source for any lazy hack writing a blog post or travel article. google returns at least eight non-wikipedia sites passing along the wrong coordinates as correct or potentially correct. in turn, those sites are used as authoritative, and the false data appear at more places, such as in IMDb forums.

never use wikipedia as a source. if the article’s worth a damn, its source for each detail will be listed, and you can simply use that (if appropriate). all information should be questioned, but much more so at wikipedia, with its laughable “community” mentality and equal access to fucking up articles, regardless of editor reputation.

here’s how much wikipedia sucks: in the Christopher McCandless article body, it gives the wrong location along with a footnote. the footnote refers to a YouTube video of a guy driving to the bus. however, even disregarding the questionable practice of using a YouTube video as a source in this instance, nowhere in the video will one find those coordinates. i won’t waste time tracking the full heritage of the error, but it appears that the video was used merely as a citation for the description of the bus’s location as “an overgrown section of the trail near Denali National Park”. apparently (again, i’m not wasting my time verifying this information disaster’s origin, so this is just a guess), hack editors then lifted that bit from the McCandless article, and it shows up in the Into the Wild article, now missing the bit about “overgrown section of the trail near Denali National Park”, transformed to a mere “an abandoned bus”, followed by the wrong coordinates and bullshit footnote to the YouTube video — a video that now does nothing as a citation but show the abandoned bus. wow. still, the footnote is placed immediately after the coordinates. the kicker: at the end of the article, in the “External links” section, appears this nugget:

63° 52′ 4″ N 149° 46′ 16″ W – Approximate geographical coordinate location of the abandoned bus.

there, added as an apparent afterthought — in direct contradiction to the primary dreck of the article body — is essentially the correct location of the bus.

good thing about wikipedia is that errors may eventually be traced to the culprit (at least the culprit IP), if one wants to go to the trouble of sifting through the edits. i burned myself out on that facility long ago, as with all editing there. my experienced opinion is that repairing wikipedia errors has the opposite result overall, just as socialism breeds more of what it claims to solve. washed my hands of the project and its abysmal administration years ago. now i’m simply regularly appalled that so few people have caught on.

Posted 20080510 08:36 under deficient press, government dumb, travel, wikipedia. Follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are closed.