Wikipedia ...

yeah-boy

Forgive me if this is in the wrong thread. Say for example Joe Dolans death yesterday http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Dolan who puts it up on wiki ? Is it just someone that has nothing to do or wiki people. I mean it is very accurate and never really outdated.

Ruu_Old

Anyone can make a contribution to the page as far as I know.

Webmonkey

Yeah anyone can contribute but obviously must be verified before becoming live.

admiralofthefleet

yup, anyone can contribute to wiki, they just record you're ip address

Terry

Yes, anyone can contribute to wikipedia, but your contribution will be deleted if one of the moderators doesn't like the content.

Karoma

yeah-boy wrote: »

Forgive me if this is in the wrong thread. Say for example Joe Dolans death yesterday http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Dolan who puts it up on wiki ? Is it just someone that has nothing to do or wiki people. I mean it is very accurate and never really outdated.

Millions of monkeys with keyboards who have too much free time and/or believe in the grand notion of making available a free encyclopedia. anyone can contribute. You may do a search for something that you want to look up, realise there isn't any information or you have more information and you can add to it... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki

Think the most bizzare things to occur with someones death was an annonymous person editing Chris Benoit's wikipeida entry stating his family were dead, hours before their bodies were found.

Source: Wikipedia double murder and suicide

A statement regarding Nancy Benoit's death was added to the Chris Benoit English Wikipedia article 14 hours before police discovered the bodies of Benoit and his family.

Dave!

lol, that's pretty wierd indeed....... Anyone else think that Chris Benoit actually edited the wiki before doing it?

Just putting that out there...

FruitLover

Webmonkey wrote: »

Yeah anyone can contribute but obviously must be verified before becoming live.

Nope, it's live straight away. Also, the edits can be reversed by anyone.

Webmonkey

FruitLover wrote: »

Nope, it's live straight away. Also, the edits can be reversed by anyone.

Ahh my bad so. Assume too much

Fozzy

DaveMcG wrote: »

Anyone else think that Chris Benoit actually edited the wiki before doing it?

Nah, it was someone in Connecticut, the police seized their computer and considered charging them with wasting police time. Don't think they did in the end though

Not all of Wikipedia is accurate. I've often come across information that's just wrong, so you can't take everything literally

1huge1

Deleted User wrote: »

Think the most bizzare things to occur with someones death was an annonymous person editing Chris Benoit's wikipeida entry stating his family were dead, hours before their bodies were found.

Source: Wikipedia double murder and suicide

Thats really quiet eerie

I do a bit of editing on wikipedia every now and then on things that interest me

LeixlipRed

Fozzy wrote: »

Not all of Wikipedia is accurate. I've often come across information that's just wrong, so you've can't take everything literally

Top marks for stating the obvious. A completely publicly edited encyclopedia is never going to be accurate. For example, I could insert "Didn't his beard and hat look funny and alien's probed his butt hole in 1843" into the wikipedia page of a former US president. Or slightly alter a really technical article so that it's not an obvious error and **** lots of students over

tech77

The odd thing about Wikipedia is that, for something that is freely editable by anyone, the language used in the articles is invariably quite presentable and coherent (whether the articles are factually correct is another matter of course).

Take a juvenile subject like say The Spice Girls or something. Surely atleast some of the experts writing about this subject would be txt-speaking, incoherent youngsters for example.
Yet the articles are still generally well-presented.
Or is it mostly guys with PhDs that write pretty much everything on the site.

Fozzy

LeixlipRed wrote: »

Top marks for stating the obvious.

The OP stated that it is very accurate, so it's not obvious to everyone

Tha Gopher

tech77 wrote: »

The odd thing about Wikipedia is that, for something that is freely editable by anyone, the language used in the articles is invariably quite presentable and coherent (whether the articles are factually correct is another matter of course).

Take a juvenile subject like say The Spice Girls or something. Surely atleast some of the experts writing about this subject would be txt-speaking, incoherent youngsters for example.
Yet the articles are still generally well-presented.
Or is it mostly guys with PhDs that write pretty much everything on the site.

Good point. tbh the amount of vandalism is fairly negligible and all.

It is just me or arew Irish topics/biographies less conscise than foreign ones? Its as if nobody in Ireland can be arsed contributing properly.

Pigman II

When it comes to DOD's it's the responsibility of the deceased to update their own Wiki page. I imagine someone gave Joe a laptop shortly before his death and asked him to do the necessary update.