#Microblog Monday 539: Controlling the Facts

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A friend posted a link to a Wikipedia page, which had been edited to contain wrong information. It had 25,000 changes since January 2025 alone, and it looked like there were two main groups of people going back and forth to replace and reestablish immutable facts, such as names and dates. Exhausting and troubling.

Depending on the day you hit the information (or even the hour you hit the information), you may walk away believing one thing or another. It made me think of those old World Book sets or Encyclopedia Britannica — if the information was wrong or biased, at least we were all working from the same information, making it slightly easier to address it because we had all read the same thing.

I learned a long time ago to take anything on Wikipedia with a grain of salt. Someone changed the principal’s name on the twins’ school’s page, and while the new name made me snicker (and it had been up there for two years!), it also highlighted the reality of mass-edited information.

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