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Ed Felten wades into the Wikipedia controversy, looking up Princeton University, virtual memory, the Microsoft antitrust case, as well as himself. Wiki holds pretty well, only botching the MS court case.
Posted by Casper at September 3, 2004 11:57 PMThe technical entries, on virtual memory and public-key cryptography, were certainly accurate, which is a real achievement. Both are backed by detailed technical information that probably would not be available at all in a conventional encyclopedia. My only criticism of these entries is that they could do more to make the concepts accessible to non-experts. But that's a quibble; these entries are certainly up to the standard of typical encyclopedia writing about technical topics.
So far, so good. But now we come to the entry on the Microsoft case, which was riddled with errors. For starters, it got the formal name of the case (U.S. v. Microsoft) wrong. It badly mischaracterized my testimony, it got the timeline of Judge Jackson's rulings wrong, and it made terminological errors such as referring to the DOJ as "the prosecution" rather than the "the plaintiff". I corrected two of these errors (the name of the case, and the description of my testimony), but fixing the whole thing was too big an effort.
Until I read the Microsoft-case page, I was ready to declare Wikipedia a clear success. Now I'm not so sure. Yes, that page will improve over time; but new pages will be added. If the present state of Wikipedia is any indication, most of them will be very good; but a few will lead high-school report writers astray.