Do You Feel Lucky?

(and feel free to comment! My older posts are certainly no less relevant to the burning concerns of the day.)

Saturday, May 31, 2008

I Made My First Wikipedia Edit.

Kind of on a whim, really. But I had to! I was just embarrassed for them. What a typo to make! Under "Examples of Memes" it said:
• Holocausts: complex produced story memes, including beliefs, such as the Jewish holocaust which never happened.

Now I read that a couple times, and I'm pretty sure they messed up a little on that. So I changed it to:
• Holocausts: complex produced story memes, including beliefs, such as the belief that the Jewish holocaust never happened.

That must have been what they meant. I'm almost sure.

Wikipedia, honestly. I can't imagine trying to keep that place honest. Anybody can go in and do a mess-up, anytime they want to, by mistake or even (if they wanted to) on purpose! My confidence level, my confidence in the truth value of the information they have on there...it's pretty low. If I had to quantify it, I'd say I feel like the content is probably between 5% and 20% fictitious at any given time. How do people rely on that?

I bet somebody changes it right back, too. Sometimes people get these weird ideas in their heads, I don't know where they come from or how they propagate.

The ideas, that is. Not the people. Although...an equally valid question perhaps?

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