farmdoc's blog post number 383

Sweetheart Vivienne’s been a New Yorker subscriber for many years. Apart from the superb writing and interesting content, something setting the New Yorker well above its competitors is its fact checking. Its fact checking quality’s legendary. The gold standard. It’s so easy to assume all other published work’s been fact checked to the New Yorker standard. But doing so’s stupid. Wikipedia, for example, is the world’s largest encyclopaedia freely accessible on the world’s fourth most popular website. But its content’s not invariably fact checked, and it’s open to amendment by people with less than altruistic motives. This article, reporting on the recent Wikipedia Academy 2009 Conference’ in Israel, describes several examples of Wikipedia inaccuracy. These include the repeated removal of reference to Iranian President Ahmadinejad as a Holocaust denier, and the citation of David Irving as an historian. But Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation which runs Wikipedia, said she was “quite comfortable” with Wikipedia’s mistakes which merely reflect fluctuating public discourse. That’s a copout, Ms Gardner. Horse shit. And as for your comment that “I know that more or less the same mistakes can be found in the New York Times”, it’s obvious why your exemplar publication is not the New Yorker. So from now on, I’ll be more circumspect about Wikipedia’s content. Much more.