I saw an excellent example of Wiki brilliance yesterday.
An article had been deleted some time ago on account of it being unreliable tosh of the very first order. It was unreferenced etc and obviously something to be wary of. However, during the life of the article it was sucked into another online repository of all human knowledge and remained there.
The Wikipedia article was subsequently rewritten by someone else and this time it was full of references and other stuff to make you feel good about it. Only problem was, the references were to the duplicate of the previously deleted article...
Amusingly I saw this too yesterday (although unless you have an interest in Motorola processors, this is probably a coincidence).
It's funny when people do this. One good thing about the GFDL is that (AIUI) anyone copying material from Wikipedia must legally say that it came from Wikipedia, so at least these things are usually easy to spot.
I was thinking it was more "I speak English. I learn it from a boooooook." but my pop culture references seem to be 10 years older than everyone else's, minimum. :D
Wikipedia tells me he was born Phillip von Hohenheim. Later, he used the name Philippus Theophrastus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim, which was what I was looking to check before posting it on someone else's LJ :)
I think I've seen his name cited in the version you use, too, so possibly he rearranged his forenames at will or added a new one every few years.
I don't remember much detail about the manner of his name changes :)
Also, I wanted to check the spelling and reassure myself that we hadn't added an extra few names in to make it more stupid. But no, it was that stupid to start with.
I spent Saturday demonstrating Physics at the open day and had great fun telling people how the wikipedia entry for what I was showing them sounded right but was wrong :)
I'm glad it's not just me. Actually I often have this experience whenever I'm not near a computer (well, I suppose I have my phone, but I've yet to be desperate enough to look up a Wikipedia article on my phone. Also if I did, I'd see something that I wanted to edit, which would be a right pain when doing it on a phone).
Weirdly, it doesn't bother me if I'm away from a computer. I just say "Ah, I'll google it later" (and 9 times out of 10 I forget).
Today I was really only verifying something I knew, not even looking it up, before I commented on another journal. I'm not sure whether this is (a) a good thing, because I check my facts (or at least check that other people believe the same wrong facts) or (b) a bad thing, because I've become the internet equivalent of institutionalised :)
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As of now, though, you do know something about most things but much of it may be slightly erroneous or highly trivial.
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An article had been deleted some time ago on account of it being unreliable tosh of the very first order. It was unreferenced etc and obviously something to be wary of. However, during the life of the article it was sucked into another online repository of all human knowledge and remained there.
The Wikipedia article was subsequently rewritten by someone else and this time it was full of references and other stuff to make you feel good about it. Only problem was, the references were to the duplicate of the previously deleted article...
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It's funny when people do this. One good thing about the GFDL is that (AIUI) anyone copying material from Wikipedia must legally say that it came from Wikipedia, so at least these things are usually easy to spot.
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Or was that not the info you were looking for? ;)
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Actually, I wanted to check whether Paracelsus was an alchemist and what the name he used for himself before Paracelsus was (and how you spelled it).
Hard at work me, oh yes!
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I did go to the Scala's website to see what you were on about - I didn't even know there was a band called that!
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I think I've seen his name cited in the version you use, too, so possibly he rearranged his forenames at will or added a new one every few years.
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Also, I wanted to check the spelling and reassure myself that we hadn't added an extra few names in to make it more stupid. But no, it was that stupid to start with.
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Today I was really only verifying something I knew, not even looking it up, before I commented on another journal. I'm not sure whether this is (a) a good thing, because I check my facts (or at least check that other people believe the same wrong facts) or (b) a bad thing, because I've become the internet equivalent of institutionalised :)
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