The latest scores keep SF well in front, even though San Diego’s actual site scored higher. The final decision isn’t until Friday, but it would take a Hollywood-style miracle to change the rankings at this point. No one tell them about the orange rubber chickens this week, ok?
Over on Slate I explain what I love about Wikipedia - its size, its freshness, its nerdily skewed content, but especially its factual errors.
One favorite example I didn’t include in the article was the entry for Wired magazine which read, “In late 1999 and 2000, Rossetto … twice tried to take the company public with an IPO, but … was eventually forced out in 2000.” In fact, both IPO attempts were in 1996, and Louis was ousted in 1998. The dates matter because the whole drama took place before, not after, the final and largest run-up of the Internet stock bubble.
How long did it take for that entry to get fixed? Nearly a year, from November 9, 2003 to September 13, 2004.
But, as I wrote, I’m one of the guilty parties who doesn’t contribute:
If I were truly conscientious, I’d have to stop and edit something almost every time I use Wikipedia. Most people are like Douglas Adams’ charactersówe resolve firmly to stay and fix it after work then forget the whole episode by lunchtime.
UPDATE: A couple of readers have asked for the details of the time “I made that mistake exactly once” in using Wikipedia as source for an article. It’s not as dishy as you’re probably hoping. In short, I paraphrased the section of Wikipedia’s Betamax entry about Akio Morita’s biography. This was in a draft version of my article on Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD. When my editor doubted Morita had said what I said he did, I had to go get a copy of the book and hunt down the quote - as I should have done in the first place. As it turned out, the original passage in the book didn’t lead to my paraphrase of Wikipedia’s paraphrase being correct, and the original wasn’t useful to the article, so we cut it.
