Ben Sisario, who wrote a 33 1/3 book on Doolittle, wants someone to correct the user-sourced encyclopedia’s entry on the Pixies, because he has evidence that the site has the year of the band’s formation wrong–and, thanks to people still being lazy using Wikipedia as something of an irrefutable source, that misstated fact is being spread far and wide. “I want to make sure this is all on the record for anyone to question or dispute, because I fear that—Wikipedia being what it is—if I simply correct the entries without explanation someone would just change them back 10 seconds later.” [CRIMES AGAINST MUSIC]
web 2.no
Why You Shouldn’t Believe Everything (Or Really Anything) You Read On Wikipedia, Part LXI
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web 2.no
web 2.no
Someone fixed it at 9:10 a.m. Yay wikipedia.
Damn I love that band. I really wanted them to record new material when they got back together. Even after hearing Bam Thwok.
God I hope no one used the wrong year in any nuclear weapon related calculations.
How weird that he wouldn’t just fix it himself, just assumed it would be undone. Not that I have the slightest idea how to write/correct anything on Wikipedia.
The inner workings of Wikipedia are almost Shakespearean drama. The damnedest things trigger passionate debates, political factions, insider battles, etc. and still the site is rife with easily verifiable misinformation. I think if more people clicked on the discussion pages, they’d be reluctant to even use Wikipedia as a starting point for research, let alone the ending point.
That said, I think correcting a date would be uncontroversial enough, but honestly, you never know.
@ragandboneshop: I guess the idea is that he wrote the long blog entry with detailed factual evidence so that someone could link to it as a reference, but if he just changed it without reference, or linked his own page as a reference, it would be easily dismissed and rewritten.