There's a great story out of The Guardian newspaper of London today tweaking North Canton-based Diebold for guerrilla media management 101 when it comes to editing a user-generated reference tool on the company's computer election machine business. In short, the Guardian reports Diebold went back-and-forth with it's revisionist view of history posted on Wikipedia to the point that they were finally accused of vandalism before the posts were restored.
We've got a local version at play in the current Akron city elections.
Here's a quick game for true political geeks: check out the background on Wikipedia's bio of Mayor Don Plusquellic. I've included this link to the specific history tool you want to use to track changes and even view prior postings; City Hall's Mark Williamson tells me it has been a running battle just keeping up with all the biography postings, including links to challenger Joe Finley's campaign website (which, by the way, asks for donations) as well as the Administration-bashing website AkronWatch.org (badly in need of updating!)
This, my friends, is the true sign of the digital political revolution! Wikipedia, as a crowd-sourced resource, is built by the people who post...not necessarily the experts in the field as you would expect from Encyclopedia Britannica, for example. Some local high school teachers (at Hoban, I am told) even inform students using Wiki-references as gospel will land them an F on their papers.
In the meantime, the tussle to post last continues to see who's version of truth goes out to the world for public consumption. Wikipedia really doesn't have a strong system for keeping such postings off the web (it is a very complicated process) so buyer, and reader, beware!
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I used to teach classes on doing web searches - and one of the first things I taught my students was that they should not just take "with a grain of salt" the information they find on the Internet - but a tablespoon.
ReplyDeleteEver since I was a kid, it was drilled into my head in school that encyclopedias weren't acceptable sources for research papers. Kudos to the high school teachers who flunk their students for using Wikipedia references for research papers.
Using them is a sign of scholarly laziness. It's a good place to get a general idea of things - and direct people to other primary sources.