Another Stakeout Another Example of What’s Wrong With Wikipedia

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As you may have heard, someone over at that great site Funny Or Die has decided to try and get Another Stakeout to become a cult movie hit.

From the site:

“For the past few weeks Chris Henchy , Tommy Blacha, Matt Besser , Paul Sheer , Owen Burke and myself have been lighting up the message board on IMDB for Another Stakeout, a completely forgettable so-so sequel starring Richard Dreyfuss and Emilio Estevez.”

“Come join us and help us turn this movie into a giant cult hit for absolutely no good reason.”  They suggest using IMDB.com’s message boards and other methods to get people interested in the movie.

This is all well and fine.  However, now someone else has updated the wikipedia.com site.  It now says things like this about Another Stakeout:

“It was named “Most Important movie of the 1990s!” by Joel Siegel at from Good Morning America and some film critics refer to this movie as “the greatest sequel” ever, even better than films like The Godfather Part II or Aliens, though this point is arguable.”

To me, this illustrates another example of how dangerous wikipedia can be.  Because wikipedia can be updated by just about anyone it is very easy to corrupt with fake facts and even downright lies.

In this situation, obviously, the edits have been all in the name of good harmless fun.  But this is just another case of the truth being edited away from wikipedia by a group or an individual with an agenda.

Case in point:  this article from Wired.com, titled “See Who’s Editing Wikipedia – Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign” describes how corporations, and even the members of government edit wikipedia.com to further their own self-interests.  And with “34.4 million edits, performed by 2.6 million organizations or individuals,” I bet it’s darn near impossible to regulate effectively.

Next time you go there to look up a definition of something, think about this: is what you found real?  Maybe we should all go back to Encyclopedia Britannica.

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