Oh young people ...

[blamebrampton]

I caught a news snippet while rushing to get dressed this morning. It was on the 10th anniversary of Wikipedia, and the journalist was interviewing a schoolboy who looked about 17. He told her that he used Wikipedia regularly and found it to be a good source. When the journalist asked him about the varying credibility and skill of Wikipedia contributors, he stared in wide-eyed horror.

After a moment, he replied, 'Well, I've only just found out about that. I thought that there was a central place it all came from where everything was checked! This is big news. I am going to have to think about this at length!'

Twelve hours later, I have nearly stopped giggling.

Comments

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

You make a good point that there are some things Wiki does do well. Their popular culture pages are at once the most likely to be up to date and comprehensive and the most likely to contain hoax information or be opinionated, though. If it is used as a first point of information gathering, it can be great, but if people stop there, we end up with the regularly dead Jeff Goldblum syndrome.

Other Wikis that are not run from Wikipedia are a different beast and there are several quite good ones, I agree with you there.