Fooled by Wikipedia

So, I'm feeling a little foolish right now because right after Sarah Palin's nomination was announced, I went to her Wikipedia page. I read it, and a few of the talk pages, and I noted that at soon as the nomination had been announced the Wikipedia troops had formed ranks and seemed to be protecting the page from bad editing.

I went away thinking that she didn't seem tooo horrible, as far as republicans go, and that I would probably hate the rhetorical and symbolic role she would play in this campaign more than her as a person. (This is close to the version I read.)

My feelings toward Palin are noticibly more extreme these days. And it looks like this period of wikipedia-induced calm was no accident, since someone who may have been a part of the campaign was cleaning up her page to make her look like an Alaskan mover and shaker, rooting out corruption and protecting the environment (which probably is pretty appealing to most people who would check wikipedia in those first hours). [via Derivative Work]


Of course, the current Palin wikipedia page is much much more useful, and through the use of RSS feeds, blogs, online news sources, and word of mouth I and many other people have gotten more info on the governor of Alaska than we thought we would ever want in the last few weeks.

So, yes, Wikipedia was misleading, it let me down in that one second, but this also drove home for me that these days the "authority" of a single source is much less important to me than the general practice of keeping your eye on lots of kinds of information, and knowing how they all fit together, who is writing what, and why. If that Wikipedia page had been the last thing I ever read about Palin before deleting all my RSS feeds, and saying goodbye to the internet, then yes, I would have been Misinformed, capital M, and it could have been avoided had I consulted a more authoritative source. But that's not how most of us process information these days, and so, tragedy averted.

In other news I've been a horrible procrastinator this week, downloading pretty Firefox extensions to kill time (this is sort of like buying lots of brightly colored school supplies in the fall when you know, that really, you are just going to have to do your work and the post it notes are not going to change that.)

But, if anyone else wants to procrastinate too, this turns the age old practice of gmailing yourself to-do items into a manageable and useful practice, and the google notebook extension, available here will mean you never have to write anything down again, and is good for taking notes to panopto or clipping phrases (it attaches a url automatically) that might be the answer to your search and seize questions, but probably aren't.