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June 19, 2006
Are Syrian nationalists changing Wikipedia entries?
Today I was playing a little game I invented called Dilettante. Dilettante is played using Wikipedia, and you start by going to a random article on the site. Then you read the article, and try to find a link that goes to something that interests you. Then, without going revisiting any old page, you leap from page to page, reading articles that interest you until you run out of time or can't visit any new pages of interest.
So, as I was saying, I'm playing Dilettante and I get to the General Electric page. Then I notice this line in the middle "Between 1927 and 1935, 52 different inventions in electricity were introduced to the company by Hassan Kamel Al-Sabbah. " GE is one of the world's biggest companies any way you measure it, and here is 1% of the article's words devoted to an engineer of minor historical significance. That's weird.
Last year a high profile comparison came out between Britannica and Wikipedia, finding Britannica only slightly more accurate. Britannica responded to the Nature article, essentially saying that many of the things that appeared to be factual errors in Britannica were in fact differences of opinion among experts.
Posted by OneEyedMan at June 19, 2006 4:47 PM
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