How credible is Wikipedia as source of information? Fairly credible, according to a study performed by Thomas Chesney, published in First Monday. Despite a 13 percent chance of mistakes (presumably ranging from simple typos to fairly serious factual errors), a panel of experts rated Wikipedia content within their fields of expertise as credible.
Surprisingly, the panel rated content outside their fields of expertise as less credible, presumably because of an inherent distrust of Wikipedia information. “Unless I know it to be true, it’s probably false,” might be the optimal approach to the wonders of Wikipedia’s vast store of knowledge.
Chesney suggests caution in reading the study as a solid endorsement of Wikipedia:
These results may be some cause for cheer by advocates of Wikipedia, but they should be taken with caution. The sample size was small and the difference between the means of the articles’ credibility was only significant at the 10 percent level, not at 5 percent. Further work should be done to verify this finding.
Still, intensified efforts should get the errors down to below 10 percent soon, and a future margin of 5 percent might be within reach. Happy days for free knowledge, as in both beer and speech!
As most thinking people know, the pronouncements of the fundamentalist religious right can be scary in the extreme. Just when you think you’ve heard it all, there’s a buck-toothed hick expressing an opinion you did not think possible. The excellent Fundies say the darndest things! has a collection of some of the more exceptional online statements made by highly religious nutcases. These range from humorous and profane to frightening and baffling.
“In my opinion, if an animal in the wild like a swan is caught being gay it should be shot on sight, disinfected, and used to feed the poor.”
Even if the majority of these comments are read as trolls or provocations, that still leaves a lot of people who really believe the illiterate and unscientific twaddle they write.
“Atheists love rape. They also love killing the babies that are conceived because of rape. Yes, nothing pleases an atheist more than to rape a woman, get her pregnant, and force her to abort the fetus.”
In some way, many of these people appear to have blown a neural circuit or two in trying to rationalise what they believe. How big a step is it from an invisible friend with superhero powers, to the voices in your head asking you to do dirty things in order to give the slut next door what’s coming to her? Not a very big step, I’m inclined to think.
“No, everyone is born Christian. Only later in life do people choose to stray from Jesus and worship satan instead. Atheists have the greatest ‘cover’ of all, they insist they believe in no god yet most polls done and the latest research indicates that they are actually a different sect of Muslims.”
Tolkien fans are understandably upset about New Line Cinema replacing Peter Jackson as director for the planned filming of The Hobbit. The dispute between Jackson and the studio revolves around money, and this petition urges New Line to reconsider their decision to drop Jackson. Purists expected a horrible mangle with the filming of the Lord of the Rings, and to the relief of most Jackson made something pretty true to Tolkien’s masterpiece. Without him, The Hobbit might not be so lucky…
