News anchor Stephen Colbert tackled another serious issue which he calls wikiality. This refers to www.Wikipedia.org, the online encyclopedia that allows anyone to add, delete or change its encyclopedia entries. Wikiality is when reality is recorded by uniformed people or people seeking to purposely mislead people.
No longer do you need to be an expert or even informed to be able to contribute to this online reference that some schools and universities direct their students to. All you need is an Internet connection and motivation to change history. This has led to a growing amount of commercial abuse. For example, the wikipedia entry about online poker is now heavily moderated since many poker companies tried to turn it into a free advertisement section for them.
There was a more alarming problem with the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) entry. This entry was originally created by some people that were clearly not the best informed. Danny Sullivan, one of the leading experts who is recognized by every major search engine tried to modify wikipedia’s SEO page. His changes were deleted and he was warned not to abuse Wikipedia. Eventually reason prevailed and his changes were re-instated.
All of this just shows that allowing the general public to write encyclopedia or any other reference material that people may use for educational purposes is dangerous. You need to ensure that people can prove expertise otherwise wikiality will become reality and people will learn truthiness and not what is actually true.
On a side note, I don’t think theres a single most article in the wiki thats changed on such a frequent basis as the SEO article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Search_engine_optimization&action=history
This is how the history has always been. History is always written by the winner and that includes all of the historian’s ideas and beliefs.
However, I think Wikipedia is a much better way to write down our history. Wikipedia introduces some checks and balances into history, whereas the traditional method does not. How do you know that Christopher Columbus landed in America in 1492? Because one dead white guy proclaimed it? (By the way, he didn’t actually make landfall until 1498.)
I trust the Wikipedia method to give me something accurate. I realize it won’t be 100% accurate, but nothing ever really is.