BritanicHUH? and WikipediDUH!

The topic I chose for this assignment was the Beatles, as I am pretty well-versed in their history.

While reviewing the entries for both Wikipedia.org and the Encyclopedia Britannica websites, I found that the information varies in many different ways. One example could be seen in who is credited in the information. Wikipedia has a laundry list of sources it attributes to it's composition (134 to be exact), while Encyclopedia Britannica attributes their research to only one person (James E. Miller). There were hundreds of edits for the Beatles on Wikipedia and a lot of “vandalism” on the page, making for inaccurate accounts of a lot of history. The contributor for the Beatles article on Britannica seemed to be creditable. He is a professor of Political Science in New York City and also wrote a book called “The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947-1977”.
Wikipedia is better with keeping the reader up to date with new information, however. Every day so far, the site has been update to update or correct the web page. The people who moderate the Beatles' web page seem to be very devoted to what they are writing about and strive to make the article as accurate as possible. The article for Britannica was written this year and is very accurate and up to date as well. However, Wikipedia would be ideal for figuring out information as the events occur.
Britannica does not have any links to websites and does not have a bibliography. Wikipedia has an extensive list of websites. Some creditable, some not so creditable. For example, the website rbmaradio.com may not be the most reliable source of information because it may be a biased account of what the writer (Kirk Degiorgio) prefers in terms of his own music. Wikipedia does not have any dead links, and all the links that are clickable seem reliable. One is sponsored by the New Zealand Historical Society and seems creditable. Another one is Last.fm. The website ends in .fm because it is by an established Internet radio community. This s a reliable source because it is “the world's largest social music platform with over 20 million active users,” as their website states.
Wikipedia and Britannica both contain similar information. However, I found that Wikipedia contains more trivial information. For example, Wikipedia fields a rumor about the remaining Beatles getting back together to finish an unreleased Lennon track while Britannica wont deal with that sort of topic. Britannica is based mostly of textbook fact and shuns the idea of publishing ideas or rumors or speculations or opinions. This is where Britannica seems to have an advantage over the sometimes biased Wikipedia entries.
Britannica has a page called “Comments and Suggestions” which offers a regular person to give advice to the writer on how to make the article better. The page is formal where you have to enter your name, email address, etc. With Wikipdia, anyone could change the page as Stephen Colbert showed in his episode of “The Colbert Report”. What is even funnier is clicking on the Wikipedia page for an elephant. The editing page for the entry on elephants is locked purely because he told people to change the article. People actually were changing the article to put in unfounded information because Colbert had said to do so. The encyclopedic authority on Wikipedia don't come in until someone is misusing the website. When Britannica decides to change an article, there is a long, drawn out process of writing to the Britannica people, your thoughts have to be reviewed and most of the time, they don't get published unless you really know what you are talking about. With Wikipedia, you don't even need an account to change information. That is why people more or less frown on Wikipedia and praise Britannica.
Overall, I think both web pages are good and could be used on different occasions. For a report in school, Britannica is definitely a good source for information that is accurate and reliable. It has been this way for years and is great for an essay or to satisfy the need for accurate and “to the point” information. If a person wants to look at information just for the sake of looking at information, Wikipedia is not as bad as people make it out to be. If a person is able to distinguish fact from fiction or biased from unbiased, then Wikipedia could be a very handy source. It is up to the reader to absorb the information with a keen eye for these different characteristics in articles.

Colbert

First off, I'd just like to say I'm a big fan of Colbert's work, and I actually saw this some time ago. I really wondered about it then and it's good to revisit that thought.

I think that Stephen makes an interesting point about truth. Stephen said that "truth" is just a matter of majority consensus, which I think is true to an extent. He even developed his own word "truthiness" which means "things that a person claims to know intuitively or 'from the gut' without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts." (That's from wikipedia.org) I believe we create truth to try to fill a void of what we don't understand. If we consider science for a moment, we could see that a countless amount of scientists develop theories on anything to try to understand mankind. Take, for example, theories on how the Earth developed. There are people who believe that the "Big Bang" theory is the truth. There are others who seriously doubt this idea. Consider the idea of the Earth being round or flat. For a long time, people were convinced that the Earth was flat. What do people have to say about this now? Well, thanks to technology we could see that the Earth is not flat, it is round. There are still people who believe that the Earth is still flat. This is a very small population, but there still people who are thoroughly convinced that the Earth is in fact flat. This is TRUTH to them.

There really is no ethic behind Clobert changing the Wikipedia entry for elephants, but it made a point that could be seen as a metaphor for what life is like today. People are just being spoonfed different beliefs that they are believing. The media publishes information about what is going on in the world and people could interpret in any way they would like. They could even change Wikipedia so many people could think this same way. People could speak opinions, but they should make sure that what they say is founded in some sort of truth and not just made up. Not just in the internet "wikipeida" world, but also in everyday life.