Sunday, 27 February 2011

Wikipedia should not be the sole source for anything, so do anything else

Interview with the founder of wikipedias who admits that established
publications can be completely wrong. He knows about it personally
because Britannica got his birthday wrong.

http://www.psfk.com/2011/02/interview-wikipedias-jimmy-wales.html
though he eventually repented, to the extent that, for a long time, it
gave him the wrong birthday. "They got it from Britannica," he once
said, "and Britannica got it wrong."
For Wales, this only reinforces a point of principle. "You shouldn't
really use Wikipedia as the sole source for anything, ever. You
shouldn't use anything as the sole source for anything, in my view."
He is, in fact, generally dismissive of traditional modes of authority
– peer-reviewed journals, the requirement for strings of letters after
names.

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