Here is why you shouldn’t follow the information of Wikipedia blindly!

New Delhi: The reliability on the various information sources on internet is escalating with each passing day even though these sources are not hundred per cent reliable. In a recent research it has been found that some pranksters tend to take their pranks to much higher level and change the information on the popular webpage Wikipedia. Wikipedia is widely known for providing information almost about everything and the revelation of the research is an evidence to prove that it must not be trusted blindly. With the pattern of letting its users edit the articles information, its image is badly being ruined by those who relish playing pranks without giving much thought to the consequences. The report published in the wikipediocracy claims that it has happened several times in history that the information is tampered with and then the false one become popular with people. An example in the article cited that a group of students wanted to tease one of their classmates named Azid. In order to play a prank on him, they edited the Chicken Korma Wikipedia page and added that Azid is synonym of the dish. The false information didn’t only continue to run on Wikipedia for some time, but several cooking websites and publications also adopted the name without digging out the proper information. Today’s generation is so blind folded with the idea of internet that they hardly re-check any piece of information that has been delivered to them through internet. Even though the Wikipedia has taken down the term and there are no traces of it on the page, it can easily be found on other cooking related pages where Korma is also being referred as Azid. The primary research about the articles put up on Wikipedia can be termed as genuine but it can’t be denied that the quality of articles is polluted from time to time by the people who do not prefer to cross-check the information and directly edit it. The Azid example is not the only one. It has happened number of times and each time it took long for people to recognize the fact that they are poured wrong information. Composer Maurice Jarre died in 2009 and Shane Fitzgerald, a sociology student, edited her Wikipedia page adding a quote by her name. Soon the quote was directly taken by several newspapers and they ran it just the way it was written. It was after a month when Fitzgerald made an appearance and told people about the edit of the page and he said, “I was really shocked at the results from the experiment. I am 100 percent convinced that if I hadn’t come forward, that quote would have gone down in history as something Maurice Jarre said, instead of something I made up.” he said. "It would have become another example where, once anything is printed enough times in the media without challenge, it becomes fact," he added.