(1 votes, average: 8 out of 10)
Loading ...The 5 worst IT-related entries on Wikipedia
It’s considered one of the Web’s most common resources, and yet technology professionals should be appalled by the information about their industry on Wikipedia.
No doubt there are few IT managers or CIOs spending their time using Wikipedia for research purposes, but if user education is at all a part of their mandate (and it should be), it’s worth checking out the main ways – besides, say, reading ComputerWorld Canada – that they learn more about the systems that drive their business processes.
It has occurred to me, of course, that I could improve some of these entries myself, and I intend to, but a crowdsourced product like Wikipedia only gets better if more than one person champions it. To wit, here are a handful of bad apples to get you started.
1. Service oriented architecture: Wikipedia has taken the severe step of disabling the ability of new or unregistered users from editing the entry until Sept. 7. The reason? Linkspam! But that’s just the beginning. The site notes that the entry needs to be cleaned up to meet its quality standards, be “wikified” with the appropriate style and verifiable sources. Maybe once the hype around SOA dies down, its Wikipedia page won’t attract the same kind of biased (or just plain lazy) editors.
2. Utility computing: You would think this would simply redirect to the entry on cloud computing by now, but for some reason the editors have chosen to keep it live, despite the fact, under a sub-section called “history,” someone has posted a notice saying, “this section or article is written like an advertisement.” Actually, it was probably cut and pasted from some vendor’s marketing collateral, but no matter. It’s been sitting there untouched since December of last year.
3. Virtualization: You want an online resource like this to provide in-depth information, but there comes a point where comprehensive just becomes confounding. The entry is simply a list of links to other entries, grouped under the headings platform, resource, application and desktop. That’s well organized enough, but do we really need separate entries on “partial virtualization” and “hardware-assisted virtualization?” I’m all for disambiguation, but this is getting a little ridiculous.
4. Social network service: Awkwardly titled so as not to be confused with the scientific social networking model, the page looks fine until you get to the part that would be most important to technology professionals. Under “business applications,” a Wikipedia editor has noted it does not “cite any references or sources.” With all the reputed online activity taking place on Facebook and MySpace, you think someone would have cleaned this up since it was pointed out in March.
5. Chief Information Officer (CIO): Not the worst description, overall, but only three actual citations. True, they are from my international IDG counterparts, but there should be some other sources. I like the last line: “Many CIOs head the enterprise’s efforts to integrate the Internet and the World Wide Web into both its long-term strategy and its immediate business plans.” If they manage to do that, maybe they’re smart enough to fix Wikipedia, too.
August 25th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
It’s good to point out where Wikipedia has faults, but it’s better to help fix them! I urge experts to participate, to clean up pages like these which can be improved, and I am willing to help with the mechanics of editing should that be a problem.
August 25th, 2008 at 10:54 pm
Hey, Wikipedia admin here. Thanks a million for the feedback! Now we’ve got some hints on areas to improve…
August 26th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
Please don’t use the word “crowdsourcing” — it implies that responsibility for the material is pushed off onto a faceless group who’ll do the work for free.
Wikipedia, like similar websites, is the product of a community & it is only as good as the community makes it. While criticizing it helps some, as Steven Walling above notes, it helps more if knowledgeable people edit the articles & help weed out the advertising & spam links. For example, the SOA article wouldn’t need to be protected from new editors if there were several people contributing their time & labor to fighting these wanna-be marketroids.
Geoff
August 27th, 2008 at 9:26 pm
@Ilywrch: “A faceless group who’ll do the work for free” is actually an excellent, and accurate, way to describe Wikipedia editors.
August 29th, 2008 at 1:16 am
Want a really bad IT entry? Not for lack of technical info, but for blatant bias? An article on a major topic that has been entirely dominated by a single corporation?
For this, you need look no further than the Wikipedia articles on OOXML:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OOXML
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML
Look at the endless archives of the talk pages at these articles and weep. Neutrality ends and opposing viewpoints are squelched when people are paid to keep things politically correct (as defined by the corporation that makes the money flow).