Friday, August 24, 2007

Wikipedia. Is it too free to use?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6947532.stm
Response to Wikipedia 'shows CIA page edits'
Wikipedia Scanner may prevent an organisation or individuals from editing articles that they're really not supposed to. Is this really true? Recently, an online tool named Wikipedia Scanner had been made to track the editors of wikipedia articles. It has recently pointed out that computers in some organizations like the CIA had vandalized some articles.
The changes are made by various users. Some of the changes are meant to correct the spelling errors or factual inaccuracies. However, there are some changes, which erased some of the potentially damaging materials while some others just add wrong features onto the articles. The Wikipedia Scanner can track the organization but cannot give out the information of the individual who changed it. According to the article, an implication can be obtained. If a hacker, who accessed the network of the organization illegally, he can change the article and leave the company all the responsibility to the organization itself.
For organizations like CIA, maybe the network is not that easy to break in, but what about other associations like the network of the Democratic Party in the US. This may cause the organization a trouble. Let think about another situation, a student in RI changed some of the important articles using the school computer. The scanner will only track to the school. The scanner cannot really ban the whole school to change the articles. They still have to clean the damage by themselves after every damaging change.
There are other kinds of deletion which Wikipedia cannot control. For example, CIA wants to change some articles on sensitive topics, it can just delete the parts that they don’t want people to see and say it is to fulfill their responsibility to keep America safe. Or they may modify the information so the article is “on their side”. Sometimes, the changes are made on the links following the articles which may not damage the article much but would prevent the readers from reading relative articles. Then people cannot really get satisfying information.
In school, we some times use wikipedia to obtain information because it is rather faster than scanning the library or “google” for the information. Thought our teachers may sometimes say wikipedia is a lousy place, many of us are still using it. Sometimes, when we want to search for some old but sensitive articles, wikipedia gives the article covered the most areas, but we cannot believe in it because it may be modified by some other people.
In a sense, even though the Scanner is invented, we still cannot prevent individuals or organizations from damaging the information. It only tells you the fact, which many don’t believe, that there are people who are vandalizing the articles. The scanner may tell you who modified it, what did he modified, but it is only for a small amount of people. Ordinary users cannot always track back the record to find out the original article. All in all, we can still say that the free encyclopedia is too FREE to get accurate information.

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