Tag Archive for 'Wikipedia'

Getting to Know the Neighbourhood – Wikipedia Changes

Published on July 6, 2011 in Social Sites. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Tracking Wikipedia Changes

Wikipedia has become a source of information for millions, but it is not without its problems. Vandalism occurs, and many authors think they know much more about a topic than they truly do. Many authors have political or commercial agendas that they build into Wikipedia articles. As most of the authors are anonymous or pseudonymous, it is difficult to evaluate the content of an individual article.

Researchers and Investigators must often monitor how political or commercial agendas are expressed in Wikipedia articles. Once you have found an article that is of concern, select the “History” tab above the article, then on the left sidebar click the “Atom” RSS badge under “Toolbox” (Atom is a type of RSS feed). Paste the URL into Google Reader. Repeat this for every article that you need to monitor.

You may do the same for the Discussion tab by going to the Discussion tab and onto its own History tab, where you can select the Atom feed for changes to the Discussion.

Offline Wikipedia

Published on November 15, 2010 in Methods and Sources. 0 Comments Tags: .

If you find Wikipedia to be a useful reference source, then get an offline copy of Wikipedia onto your MS Window machine using WikiTaxi or  Linux users can install Wikipedia Dump Reader from KDE.

I read it on the Internet – it must be true!

Published on March 11, 2009 in Methods and Sources. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

Wikipedia

Wikipedia has become a source of information for millions, but it is not without its problems. Vandalism occurs, and many authors think they know much more about a topic than they truly do. Many authors have political or commercial agendas that they build into Wikipedia articles. As most of the authors are anonymous or pseudonymous, it is difficult to evaluate the content of an individual article.

How Wikipedia Works

If you use Wikipedia, may I suggest that you refer to How Wikipedia Works.  Chapter 4 is titled, Understanding and Evaluating an Article. This is the most useful chapter for professional researchers. If you haven’t used Wikipedia much, may I also suggest reading Chapter 3, entitled Finding Wikipedia’s Content, which is about searching.

Article History

Go to the top of the article and click on the tab marked history for a list of the people who have changed the article. You can compare the changes to see what changed in each version of the article by using the radio buttons. You will often notice that certain “contributors” are really vandals and knaves.

Look at the History and Discussion tabs for the article on the Danish Muhammad cartoon controversy to see how these can be really important. You can quickly tell who not to trust from reading the discussion pages and looking at the history tab content on many articles. For example, look at the contributor RanEagle in the history tab and click on talk.

Sockpuppetry

Mark Schaver writes on the Depth Reporting blog about a site, WikiScanner, that reveals organizations where employees have made anonymous edits of Wikipedia articles.

Another List of Social Networking Sites

Published on January 30, 2008 in Private Investigator, Search Engines, Social Sites, Sources and The Investigator's Computer. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Wikipedia maintains a long list of social networking websites. The links are to other Wikipedia articles about the listed sites so that you can get a feel for what the sites might offer.