Wikipedia's perfection (was Re: Discussion of the relative advantages/disadvantages of PAE (was Re: Memory >3.5GB not used?))

[Bill Moran]

In response to Thomas Dickey <dickey at radix.net>:

> On Wed, Apr 25, 2007 at 08:31:53AM -0400, Bill Moran wrote:
> > (of course, everyone knows that Wikipedia is the ultimate source of
> > information and is infallible, right?)
> 
> hardly.  I'd expect that most intelligent readers would have encountered
> at least one wikipedia article which is inaccurate.  Like any source
> of information, it's only a starting point.

Hmm ...I suppose I should have explicitly marked that comment as
sarcasm.  I simply expected that people would understand that such a
ridiculous remark could only be tongue-in-cheek.

A friend of mine going for his Dr. at CMU (Patrick Wagstrom: GNOME guy)
describes an exercise where a professor intentionally injected false
information into Wikipedia, then gave his students a research assignment
that involved that information.  Apparently the number of students who
trusted the false information without verifying it was quite high.  I
should take that as a lesson that most people _don't_ know how to verify
the validity of information and be more careful when I make sarcastic
statements.

-- 
Bill Moran
http://www.potentialtech.com