brendandwyer said:
This is a forum where 95% are amatuers and there are some pro's you drop in to help.
legionserial said:
Even the founders of Wikipedia will back that up. A fair few peolpe got fails for citing Wikipedia in essays. And the founders comments were pretty much along the lines of 'if you are doing an important paper, then of course you shouldn't cite Wikipedia, we aren't here for that purpose, and we aren't the authority on anything. Go and do some proper research instead'
I tend to look for info in Wikipedia however. Often it provides some interesting links, but I would never use it as a sole basis for gaining information....its not too bad a starting point as long as you are aware that you shouldn't rely on it 100%.
These two guys gave some very good answers and important points,IMHO (and undertand, this is indeed all "O" here).
As much as I have truuely come to like and enjoy this forum, and as much as I have learned from it (more on that in a minute), brendan is right; the vast majority - at
least 95% - of participants on this forum are rookies who are still learning many fundamentals. Thats fine, that's great; this is a very complicated and technical subject that takes a long time to master. I've been at it since 1979 and I still don't consider myself anything like a master at it. But, excuse me for putting it this way, there is a tendancy for a lot of blind leading the blind when the same people asking the questions are also providing the answers. The urban myths, the misuderstandings, and the outright untruths that continue to fly around this board and refuse to die are downright remarkable.
There are people like Harvey with microphones, John , Tom and Brad with mastering, Jay with mixing, electronics and drums, Benny with Pro Tools and audio for video, and a few others (who I am not leaving out on purpose but they know who they are) who battle these myths and misunderstandings on their own fronts on a dialy basis. Frankly, ultimately they win a few battles, but it's a lost war because for every rookie that's enlightened, 10 more come on and start the same old stuff all over again. But they don't stop, and neither will I for whatever little bit I can contribute.
Ultimately the shortcoming with Wikipedia and even more so with public forums like this is the double-edged sword of the Internet itself. Because of it's easy and even accessability, it's anonymity, and it's lack of rules of law, anarchy regins in information; everybody and their dog is suddenly an "expert". Where people get the idea that just because one CAN speak freely that they SHOULD speak freely I have yet to figure out. The right to free speech, as with all rights, implicity comes with the responsibility to exercise the right responsibly. The right to express an opinion implicity comes with the responsibility not to mistake opinion for truth.
But the Internet remains a culture-rich breeding ground for irresponsible behavior when it comes to the exercise of these rights. Anybody with a chip on their shoulder or other need to get their ya yas out can - and usually does - come on the Internet and start acting like a master of some topic, regardless of whether they actually have any chops or not, and when you call them on it, they gt all pissed and take the "all opinions are valid" defense. Yes, all opinions are valid. But when one starts representing opinions as factual statements, the line is crossed. There is a whole lot of line crossing on this board. I am not claiming to be completly above the fray, BTW. I have made a few mistakes in the past, and will probably contnue to make a few in the future; though I at least put my best effort into avoiding them.
And the fact is, Wikipedia is not that much less succeptable to this kind of human behavior than the rest of the public access Internet is. It is somewhat less succeptable, sure. But it's still open to problems like cultural mythologies, vandalism, incomplete entries, inaccurate condensations of higher sources. No number of truely qualified fact checkers exists, let alone can be supported by an NPO, to marshall a database the size of Wikipedia and keep the QC of it's information to a reasonable level on a timely basis. Jimmy Wales and the team at Wiki understand this completly, which is why they say things like what legionserial alluded to in the quote above.
And sure, printed books and printed encyclopedias contain mistakes and inaccuracies. But at nowhere near the rate that one finds on Wikipedia these days. And the neat thing about books is that when errors are found, they are easily corrected by distributed errata sheets that will hold the data true until the next printing. In the real-time, online world, errata sheets are worthless because new errors crop up every hour; what few fact checkers there are are constaintly chasing their tails in an even less winnable battle than Harvey, John, Tom, Brad, Jay, Benny and the other pros here fight every day.
Can you imagine what would happen if the general public were allowed to maintin a dictionary of the English Language? Get a printed dictionary and look up the word "chaos".
G.
