I found Erika's example of getting a previous class to change a page on Wikipedia to read that the University of Otago fully supports couch burning pretty interesting, and there was more on this form of credibility testing in the reading from Chesney, so I decided to give it a try for myself. I went to the wiki on Studholme College and entered the line "It was revealed in early 2008 that students of Studholme College have been the most likely to take part in the notorious Castle Street riots of 2006 and 2007, which were linked to a visit from University of Canterbury students." Now of course while this information could possibly be true, I have made up a random fact on the spot and entered it freely. It has only been about 10 minutes since I entered it, and it still hasn't been deleted, but think how many people in the world could have perhaps read the page in the window of time before that line gets removed? Imagine if that was a wiki about a particular part of communication studies that you are looking up for your essay, and you unluckily read a page within the half hour period that somebody has come along and deliberately (or even unintentionally) uploaded incorrect information to. The Chesney reading has a large highlighted question "So what then is the use of an encyclopaedia which might be unreliable? For some it is no use, for others, it's a good starting point." In the world of Web 2.0 and wikis where anybody can change the information, I agree that wikipedia should only be used as a starting point for gaining new information. Chesney says that some experts highly rated the credibility of wikipedia pages, however there is the fact that his study revealed that 13% of wikipedia pages have errors. It seems to me that you will never know if this error margin is applying to the page you are reading or not, so until you have backed it up with solid knowledge released by professionals (whether this is located in a textbook or a blog) I don't believe Wikipedia can ever be 100% trustworthy.
P.S. Let me know whether or not that line is still on the Studholme College page when you read my post!! :)
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UPDATE: Almost a week on and the false text I entered onto Wikipedia is still there!
As of Thursday the 10th of April, it's still there....you might want to edit it back if it hasn't been cleaned up by the end of term, as a courtesy to the College :)
Lol Yeah of course. I wonder if they havn't really checked it because it isn't an "important" page. I'm sure if I entered something like that on the page of George Bush then it would be gone within seconds.
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