Tonight, Stephen Colbert discussed how Wikipedia is influencing culture on his show. After saying something to the effect of

I love Wikipedia: any site that has a longer entry on truthiness than on Lutherans has its priorities straight.

He then went on to make a point that Wikipedia reports “facts” as a collection of ideas that a group of people agree with.

He initially claimed to log onto Wikipedia during his show and change one of his documented quotes. I logged on right after the show, and it didn’t look like the text he mentioned was included anywhere on the page, but the page was getting sufficient traffic that Wikipedia had to lock the article to prevent vandalism.

What they missed was the screenshot below on elephants. Colbert mentioned that we can collectively change world facts by agreeing that say “The number of elephants has tripled in the last 6 months.” Within seconds, that text appeared at the top of the Wikipedia article on Elephants.

There’s been all sorts of talk about the pros and cons of Wikipedia after the Adam Curry incident. Recently, Wikipedia added to the confusion surrounding Ken Lay’s death by posting a number of details about how he allegedly died.

In my own personal research, I tend to use Wikipedia as a starting point, but inevitably, I will find an error, omission, or something that is just downright confusing. I would never use it as the definitive source for anything. I think Colbert’s experiment just goes to show how easy it is for anyone to add incorrect information to an entry. In this case, the edit in question was highly publicized, so easily correctible, but as of 12:10AM, the entry is clearly wrong.