Incoming College Freshmen "Tech Illiterate"

Originally Posted by taiga

I really don't understand this whole distrust of Wikipedia. I mean, could one really go and edit the information so that it says some crazy thing like Genghis Khan flew to the moon in 1783 on a magical dragon named Gertrude? How long would something like that stay on? Don't they have people like... running that site? Honestly I've never found one thing on Wikipedia to be untrue, and I always cross-reference what i read there.

And what actually constitutes "credibility"? We're all human. Britannica was written by humans, Encarta was written by humans. Thomas Fucking Jefferson is a primary source and he swore he never got down with Sally Hemmings... but what do you think?

The thing with Wikipedia is that anyone can change info if they want. For example, one time I looked up "Dinosaur" on wiki, and instead of getting a page that discussed the large creatures that existed millions of years ago, I got a page where someone essentially said "There's no such thing as dinosaurs, God created the world 6,000 years ago, and that's the truth!"

Intrigued by this, I followed the page history for a few minutes. Like every 5 minutes or so, it kept reverting back to a page showing dinosaurs as we know them according to research done on them, and the page where a Bible nut was trying to delete all that info.

Finally, it got a "page can't be edited by new/unregistered users", because of that "back and forth war" (and it's still there if you look up dinosaur). I once got a similar situation when looking up "woman" where instead of a page showing what a woman is, I got a paragraph where someone said women were the devil (I guess he got dumped or rejected, and took it way too personally).

I like wikipedia for just looking up general information, but I usually take it with a grain of salt because a lot of the stuff written there can't be verified (meaning they don't cite their sources, so that someone who wants to check up on the information can't find out where they got that info from, which is a big no-no in academic studies/research. If you don't cite sources, how do they know you didn't pull those facts/information out of your ass?). Of course, this is slowly being corrected (notice a lot of pages will now have "Citation needed", meaning if something is said on a wiki page, then you need to back it up with where you got that information from), so I think a few more years and wiki will be reliable. But for now it could be misleading, and could give people the wrong ideas about stuff.

I suppose I used extreme and maybe silly examples, but you get the general idea. If someone who isn't trained on the subject starts to add their own info in it, what if they're wrong? Sure, they might've had good intentions, but what you believe is right may not always be what's the correct thing (particularly when it comes to history).

Regarding Thomas Jefferson, while he claimed he never did it, there are many people who will often try to hide their um, bad side, or at least try to minimize it. To use another example, lets look at Strom Thurmond. Here was a guy who fought in World War 2, and was a US Senator for a long period of time. During his time in office, he's been known to have racist attitudes (such as filibustering the Civil Rights Act of 1957, although he seems to have abandoned those views later in life). And no doubt a long time from now, people will remember him for those things, having fought in WW2 and then was a Senator for a long period of time.

However, something that was largely kept secret (and only revealed after he died) was the fact that he had fathered a child with a black woman. The woman said she only did this after he died out of respect for him, and wasn't doing it for money or fame (but no doubt to make sure that history remembers this was another thing he did). When you read history books later on, will they include this information in, or will they omit it, deeming it not important? And in the case of wikipedia, there may be some people who wouldn't want this information out, so would delete all references to this, to make it as if he never had this child (again, consider his racist stance early on, and then having an affair with a black woman).

Again, you have to take this stuff with a grain of salt, unless they include citations and sources so you (or anyone else) can find out where they got that information from. I have nothing against offering differing points of view, but a lot of times people will let their biases get the better of them when they write down stuff in wikpedia. The Crusades, for example, will seem to a Christian, as their duty to go and free the Holy Land from infidels who were defiling the place where Christ once lived. However, Muslims (and to a lesser extent, Jews) will see this "crusading army" as a threat, one that they have to fight against and kick out (particularly considering how brutal the 1st Crusade was once they got into Jerusalem). While you could get a neutral point of view, if a strongly biased Christian edits the info, you can bet the Muslims will seem like monsters. Conversely, if a strongly biased Muslim edits it, they will make it seem like they were victims of Christian aggression, and that it was their religious duty to drive these forces out. Marxists also painted another image, showing the Christians as only going there for financial reasons (mostly to find plunder/land, and no doubt some did, but recent research shows that many did it for religious reasons only, and many rich nobles sold lands and went broke financing themselves and other people to go on Crusades). But boy does the Marxist approach paint a good, if inaccurate picture of it.

It's because of stuff like this why you should be careful when looking up information (particularly online). Yes, we're only human, but if you do your research properly, then you won't look like a fool when you present stuff (again, this is mostly just academic stuff, but even in like the Political Palace, if you don't know what you're talking about, you'll often get flamed, and rightfully so).

Jam it back in, in the dark.