On Wed, 22 Jan 2014, wrote:

On Wed, 22 Jan 2014 17:17:41 -0800, "William Sommerwerck"
wrote:

"Phil Allison" wrote in message ...

** And Wiki says otherwise:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_component

Wikipedia is wrong.
In 2013 Wikipedia was compared to a major printed encyclopedia (I
don't remember which right now) and the percentage of errors was
pretty much the same for both. This is not to say that the errors were
the same or on the same subject or in any other way related except
that they were errors. The point is that they both contain errors. So
William could indeed be correct when he says that Wikipedia is wrong.
If that is truly the case then I think it would be a good thing if he
corrected the Wikipedia article and used references to back up the
correction. I really appreciate all the time folks have spent, and
continue to spend, on entries to Wikipedia. It is obvious that many
people have spent many hours researching, documenting, and writing for
Wikipedia and all this effort is unpaid. Since I have so far not been
able to contribute any information to Wikipedia my only recourse has
been to contribut cash. I hope William has the time and inclination to
correct the errors he has seen on this subject in Wikipedia.
Eric

But wikipedia is for everyone.

The fact that someone doesn't know anything doesn't matter. They read a
book or see a movie, and then start an entry for it. They aren't allowed
to "create the facts" themselves, they have to have references. I've seen
entries that are like short versions of books, people able to point to the
bit in the book, but unable to evaluate the information because they've
not read anything more.

The first time I saw mention of wikipedia, someone had pointed to the
entry for Don Lancaster's TV Typewriter. But for some reason, someone
missed the early details, just had information from the second book (where
he jammed NOPs into a CPU so it would advance the address counter and thus
cycle through memory). But someone didn't know that there was the earlier
method with counters and all that, so they couldn't question what was
missing or wrong. I said "but that's not complete" and detailed why. A
couple of days later, someone had fixed the entry.

Of course, some of the errors come because there's not enough unifying.
My great, great, great grandfather has an entry, it mentions one of the
children being married to another entry, but in that entry for the
husband, it gets the ancestry wrong, and I don't think the husband has a
link to my ancestor. Two entries that have different information should
indicate something is wrong, but if nobody looks at both entries (and they
might not know of the other entry, or the connection) then they'll
never know one has bad information.

Michael