DBF sent me an article this morning that is quite interesting. Briefly, Wikipedia has announced that,
[…] last week Wikipedia acknowledged it had been hijacked by global warming alarmists who squelched dissenting science.
Turns out one of the editors of the subject was very decidedly on one side of the fence. All well and good, but it was discovered that he was deliberately preventing anyone with an opposite view of the matter from adding their information to the page.
He routinely deleted entries that presented competing views and barred contributors with whom he disagreed. He also smeared scientific skeptics by rewriting their online biographies.
Nice.
Now, many of us have been warning students that Wikipedia might be a good jumping-off point for doing research, but shouldn’t be considered an authoritative source. Now it appears that articles may be even more suspect that we had thought.
How many students have gotten their information on this subject from Wikipedia, only to have gotten only one side of the story? How many other pages are being slanted like this?
Kudos to Wikipedia for putting a stop to this, but I have to wonder how many other rogue editors are lurking in their pages.
