Just one morning topics:
Wikipedia Used To Spread Virus
"The German Wikipedia has recently been used to launch a virus attack. Hackers posted a link to an all alleged fix for a new version of the blaster worm. Instead, it was a link to download malicious software. They then sent e-mails advising people to update their computers and directed them to the Wikipedia article. Since Wikipedia has been gaining more trust & credibility, I can see how this would work in some cases. The page has, of course, been fixed but this is nevertheless a valuable lesson for Wikipedia users."
Daniel Brandt found the examples of suspected plagiarism at Wikipedia using a program he created to run a few sentences from about 12,000 articles against Google Inc.'s search engine. He removed matches in which another site appeared to be copying from Wikipedia, rather than the other way around, and examples in which material is in the public domain and was properly attributed. Brandt ended with a list of 142 articles, which he brought to Wikipedia's attention.... 'They present it as an encyclopedia," Brandt said Friday. "They go around claiming it's almost as good as Britannica. They are trying to be mainstream respectable.'"
Long-Term Wikipedia Vandalism Exposed
"The accuracy of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, came into question again when a long-standing article on 'NPA personality theory' was confirmed to be a hoax. Not only had the article survived at Wikipedia for the better part of a year, but it had even been listed as a 'Good Article,' supposedly placing it in the top 0.2-0.3% of all Wikipedia articles — despite being almost entirely written by the creator of the theory himself."
Good thing is that once discoveded all problems were immediately cleared and offenders banned. Wikipedia is really fast on fixing problems. The concusion is of course - Wikipedia is a great free resource, but don't believe everything you read there.
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