Police told to use Wikipedia for court preparation
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The Crown Prosecution Service is telling police officers to use Wikipedia to prepare for court cases.
Mike Finn, an expert witness on martial arts and weapons, told the Police Review he was involved in a case in the Midlands and asked to prepare a report on a weapon.
According to the Telegraph, Finn said: "The material they gave me had been printed out from Wikipedia.
"The officer in charge told me he was advised by the CPS to use the website to find out about the weapon and he was about to present it in court.
"I looked at the information and some of it had substance and some of it was completely made up."
Finn said he had heard of at least three other cases were police were told by the CPS to get onto Wikipedia. He added: "When an organisation like the CPS tells you to look at Wikipedia, you might believe it is some kind of authority. It is unsettling that potentially unsafe and inaccurate evidence could be presented in court." ®
COMMENTS
Follow the money
Not the Reg's usual standard. Why did the expert witness make this unverified comment?
Who doesn't get paid if plod uses a standard information source?
Of course Wikipedia is not the be all and end all of human knowledge but neither does it pretend to be, no wikipedia editor gets paid when their writing is cited elsewhere unlike this 'expert' who makes his living at it.
I started editing there because i found things that were incorrect and if everybody else who found errors did the same rather than spouting off about how their personal knowledge is, allegedly, so much better then maybe, just maybe reliability might improve.
Wikipedia is High Tech
"In the real (non IT) world, Wikipedia is widely regarded as the most convenient and accessible source of readily available information - the end!"
I am always showing people WikiPedia, they are amazed having never seen it before. People think that Google Chrome and Google are the same thing. They have never heard of Firefox and Opera.
They saw when they ran Google that there was an icon to get the upgraded Google called Google Chrome. They dutifully upgraded their Google to Google Chrome. They have never heard of a Web Browser only Google.
I found this all very confusing.
Obviously Internet Explorer users get an Icon on their Google home page that says upgrade to Google Chrome web browser. Now the techies would almost never click on a banner or an icon on a website. Where we would not even be able to see the adverts our users will see only the adverts, if one says "your computer could be infected, click here for a free checkup" they will click this.
If these people use Wikipedia then they are power users.
Re: Reid Malenfant
"Absolutely EVERYTHING ELSE is regarded as just too boring and geeky to give even a second thought to; most people I know actually delight in their computer illiteracy"
True, I saw a colleague reading the BBC News Tech section and told him that he should read The Register if he cared about technology.
His response was that BBC News is good enough. True, for most people the BBCs simplistic tech stories are all they feel they need to know, or in most cases more than they feel they need to know.
Chirpy guff about Twitter and some guy nicking virtual money in a MMORPG is cutting edge high tech stuff to most people.
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