This evening, I read an article on ESPN.com about the imminent retirement of Frank Broyles, who has been either football coach or athletic director at the University of Arkansas since 1958. This led me to look up something on Wikipedia related to this event, where I read the following sentence: "Houston Nutt is married to his wife, Diana."
Really? He's married to his wife? That's amazing! How did he manage that?!?
And here, folks, is why Wikipedia is a bad thing. ANYONE CAN EDIT IT. This is not good. If we're going to have a widely accessed online reference tool available for anyone to edit, then we're only helping the sort of people who want Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments shown after An Inconvenient Truth because we need to hear both sides of the argument on global warming.
Well ... the other side of it is that you could've clicked edit to repair such a numb-headed statement.
ReplyDeleteMost of the times that I've ever seen an error on Wikipedia, I'm usually surprised to find it already fixed by the time I switch to the edit screen to fix it myself.
I could wax pseudo-intellectual on the merits of peer review on a massive scale or the emergent behavior of groups acting toward a specific goal, but I'm saved from trying to sound smart by the existence at least one study that confirms the considerable accuracy of Wikipedia (not quite Britannica, but close) -- and factual accuracy is probably more important than not being irritatingly redundant.
P.S.
No Heston