My Wikipedia editing experience

I couldn't sleep at 3AM this morning, so I got up and flipped on CNN. Turned out Larry King was interviewing Crown Prince Albert of Monaco. (Who he always introduced as "The Serene Crown Prince Albert of Monaco.")

In passing, the Prince mentioned that while it had been rumored that his mother, actress Grace Kelly, had died in a car accident on the same Monaco road she and Cary Grant are seen driving on in It Takes A Thief, it wasn't true; the accident was actually on another local road, higher on the hill.

For some reason, I got the idea of looking up Grace Kelly in Wikipedia to see what it had say about that. It said that she had died on the road used in the movie.

The Wikipedia has been somewhat controversial. In my experience, for subjects in the mathematical field, it usually gives better, clearer explanations than other online sources. I would guess this is because the facts are undisputed, and as the manner of their expression evolves under many hands, it just gets better and better.

But in cases where the facts themselves are not widely known, there is no guarantee that what Wikipedia says is true. (See this attack on Wikipedia from former editor of the Britannica.) And the Grace Kelly accident was a clear example.

The good news, however, is that, having heard Prince Albert authoritatively tell the world that the rumor about the accident was false, I could fix it then and there. I simply edited Grace Kelly's Wikipedia entry, which now reads, " It had been rumored that she was driving on the same stretch of highway in Monaco that had been featured in To Catch a Thief, although her son, Prince Albert of Monaco, says it was not the same road."

The bad news and the good news: Wikipedia is not completely reliable, but if there is an error, someone may fix it in the fullness of time -- something not necessarily true in traditional encyclopedias like the Britannica.

One thing mystifies me. I didn't see any way I could write a note that explained my change. I would have liked to have said, for the benefit of anyone who had doubted my change, that I heard the fact of the matter from the mouth of Prince Albert himself. But it didn't seem appropriate to put that write into the Kelly entry itself, and there was no place else I could find to leave a comment. The fact that there is apparently no "discussion group" or note facility associated with the entries seems to be a real negative.

I'll spare you, Dear Reader, the usual musings on how Wikipedia is an open source encyclopedia exactly as Linux is an open source OS, and what that means for the future of knowledge, etc., etc.

Update: someone left a comment to this post, which informed me that there is a discussion page attached to every entry -- maybe I didn't see it because I'm not a registered user? Also, there's a way of embedding comments, as well as a revision note, which I also didn't see, maybe for the same reason, or maybe because is was 3AM and I was too bleary-eyed. So that's good and makes more sense...

Comments

[Carthik]

Each page at the 'pedia has a discussion page. You could have left a note there.

There is also a way of leaving comments in the wiki text that do not show up on broswers

Thirdly, you can leave a note before saving the page, in the little text entry field above "submit" which will show up as a revision not for that page, for your edit...

Regards.

["Ingoolemo"]

I hate to say this in such a blunt fashion, but you were probably just bleary-eyed. The options are visible to all logged in users. Better luck next time :)

[Gary Robinson]

Thanks. :)

[Denise Bags]

I take Wikipedia with a HUGE grain of salt, as half the times the articles appear to have been written by a teenage with grammar problems (and no access to spell check). That Wiki flubbed information about Princess Grace is no surprise... I've found articles on Wikipedia on several occasions and just shaken my head at how WRONG the information was. I'm sure they have wiki moderators, but do we really expect them to check and verify every bit of information (including celebrities lives from several decades ago?)
Interesting post though.