- the article introduced the exact dates of birth and death for Defoe – in fact, these are uncertain, although it is believed that Defoe had mentioned his DOB in Robinson Crusoe.
- his father was a butcher – he wasn’t
- his name was a nom de plume – his early works are written anonymously
- he was born in Stoke Newington – he wasn’t,
and so forth.
Now, if we go to Defoe’s page at Wiki, it seems that Duguid’s efforts have brought some results. Defoe’s date of birth is now dated between 1659 and 1661, his father is no longer a butcher (although a member of the Butcher’s Company), etc. But, as Paul writes in his blog, The Quality of Information, Wikipedia may go to print, and in this case they need to be strict with their authors. He blogs a lot about whether or not Wikipedia can be trusted.
What sometimes stuns me about Wiki is its choice for articles. Russian Wiki, for instance, is still very much behind her English or French sisters, but some content is hardly of an encyclopedic nature. I was amazed to find out that a girl who’s only just made one film and hasn’t yet received any prizes etc., has already got a Wiki page. This has clearly been done for promotion, and I don’t honestly think that this is in line with the spirit of encyclopedia (even the one written by ‘simple’ people).
Links:
Paul Duguid’s blog, The Quality of Information, http://infoqual.blogspot.com/
Berkeley University Podcasts and Video Lectures, http://webcast.berkeley.edu/
History of Information course, the lecture mentioned in this post is called ‘Search, Storage and Retrieval’.
Previous choice of the Berkeley video lectures available from Google Videos (David Lynch on cinema and Modern Literary Manuscripts).
