In Dubner’s last post, he noted that Wikipedia sometimes gets it right and sometimes misses badly.
I just visited the entry on me in Wikipedia. What is amazing to me is that if you click on “history,” the page has been altered about 50 times in the last few months. Don’t people have anything better to do? The amount of detail in the entry is amazing, really.
Then I checked out Dubner’s page at Wikipedia. By the time you read this, someone will probably have changed it, but as I write, among his other illustrious accomplishments, he is listed as being one of the notable figures born in 1942. Unless he has been lying to me about his age, I believe that is about twenty years off from the truth.
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Now that it’s been corrected, the version Levitt saw is here.
— BlarI’ve heard that Dubner is part of the International Bush Conspiracy. He’s the fruit of an illicit union between George Herbert Walker Bush and Nancy Sinatra.
Consider the names: Dubner - Dubya. It simply can’t be a coincidence.
— DonTwenty years off?!? - wow, Dubner’s pretty insightful for someone born in 1922!
— AbracadabHere’s my guess: There are different types of editors:
some guy is interested in building the universal encyclopedia and has some time –he writes whole articles;
the person who sees an article is incomplete and for some reason it is important to him — he writes a few paragraphs;
the person who sees a fact is wrong — “she hasn’t written two books, she’s written three…” — and makes the correction.
Thus the detail, and the number of posts, people making small corrections and additions; but the number of people who write complete articles is small.
— philloomis