Wikipedia, my old friend. Yes, like Twitter (now “X”… gag) isn’t a source, Wikipedia is a great place to start cross-checking and researching a story, but it’s not strictly a “source.” Something I noticed with this episode of Crash Course: Navigating Digital Information, the original mindset was how do you, as someone getting news from the web, verify that the story you’re reading is “true”? But with this episode the focus has flipped from checking the news in your feeds, to where do you go to begin your research. The focus has seemed to flip from the reader to the writer. Obviously the requirements for a reader would be different than those for a writer, both are seeking to truth in a story, but one is starting the process and the other is more “confirming” the process. Either way, Wikipedia is a good place to start. 

As a reader I want my information to be reliable and it’s annoying that one cannot trust information found online, especially from unknown sources. But as a writer it’s all the more important to get things right. A writer I have a lot of respect for, got the first name of one of the debaters participating in last week’s GOP Presidential Debate wrong. Maybe it was a mistake in the moment or maybe he did it on purpose, I have no way of knowing, but I was surprised. Now this writer doesn’t work with a big news bureau, so there are no fact-checkers to double-check things before he presses the send button, so even the best of us publishes errors from time to time. That’s one of the cool things about Wikipedia, you can track any changes and who made the changes in any article. That’s part of what makes it a good resource for further research. 

That’s also one reason that I call myself a journalist and not just a blogger or social media dude, as important as the presentation of the narrative is, I have to get the basic facts of the story correct. Period. I think this is important and that’s one way that I’m probably different from many of the other voices on the web. I had to remind a FaceBook friend twice that the story he posted was false. The second time he commented that he was surprised that I would point out the false claim again. Weird. There are honest mistakes, posting the same information after it’s been pointed out to be false a second time, that’s unacceptable. It is kind of miraculous that a crowd-edited resource like Wikipedia actually works, considering how some vocal folks actively don’t like when their point(s) of view are debunked. And it’s understandable that some articles have to be locked down because the vocal minority can’t help themselves but try to deface the information. 

We are an imperfect species where errors get passed off as truth for generations but that doesn’t diminish the importance of correcting the errors and not assuming that there is either no truth or that all opinions are valid. There’s such a thing as not having enough information to make a judgment and making changes to a past judgments based on new information. Our understanding of our existence is a moving target that we hope to get right. It’s an ongoing process. The Truth is not a finalized subject. That’s why it’s always a good thing to have an EDIT button handy. 

What things do you remember finding in your encyclopedia that were later proven to be untrue? 

Sources:

• Using Wikipedia: Crash Course Navigating Digital Information #5 by Crash Course (2019-02-05), https://youtu.be/ih4dY9i9JKE?si=mL8xN-W2875vn4yG, retrieved 2023-08-29