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60 Percent of Wikipedia Entries about Companies Contain Errors

infoneer-pulse:

A new study published in the Public Relations Journal shows that a stunning 60 percent of articles about specific companies contained factual errors. All those mistakes are surely a mix of simple errors and straight-up sabotage, however the really discouraging findings come in the form of user support: Over 40 percent of the 1,284 people in the survey waited days before hearing a response to their requests for corrections: 24 percent never heard back at all.

» via The Atlantic

(via thelifeguardlibrarian)

What we read and how we are tracked can create false portraits of ourselves.
theatlantic:

The Day Yahoo Decided I Liked Reading About Child Murder

On February 8, 2012, I was on Yahoo’s homepage when a headline caught my eye: “Mo. teen gets life with possible parole in killing.” Curious, I clicked to see what atrocity had transpired in the state where I live. Alyssa Bustamante, a teenager from Jefferson City, had strangled and stabbed her nine-year-old neighbor for the sheer thrill of it, later describing the event in her diary as an “ahmazing” experience. Horrified, I closed the page. Like many whose homepage defaults to Yahoo, this quick scan of a story was a rote action, information via procrastination, almost subconsciously performed every morning before I move on to other things. In this case, the story was so awful that I wanted to get away. Except, it turned out, I couldn’t.
For the next month, I woke up to a barrage of horrifying stories that seemed to signal an epidemic of child torture in America. “3-year-old recovering after swallowing 37 powerful magnets,” Yahoo solemnly informed me on March 5; “Police: Alaska girl locked in frigid bedroom dies” on March 6. Occasionally the child in question survived their ordeal (“7-year-old boy survives brush with tornado in North Carolina”, March 4) but more often than not they were the adversary (“Boy, 9, charged in shooting of third-grade classmate”, February 23; “11-year-old California girl dies after fight with classmate”, February 26; “Texas boy, 12, accused of brandishing loaded gun”, February 27; “10-year-old girl’s death in fight with student ruled homicide”, February 27).  
I rarely clicked on any of these headlines, and at first, I didn’t notice the way they had crept into my Yahoo homepage — and into my mind — until their pervasiveness became impossible to ignore.
That’s when I realized: Yahoo had decided I liked child murder.
Read more.

What we read and how we are tracked can create false portraits of ourselves.

theatlantic:

The Day Yahoo Decided I Liked Reading About Child Murder

On February 8, 2012, I was on Yahoo’s homepage when a headline caught my eye: “Mo. teen gets life with possible parole in killing.” Curious, I clicked to see what atrocity had transpired in the state where I live. Alyssa Bustamante, a teenager from Jefferson City, had strangled and stabbed her nine-year-old neighbor for the sheer thrill of it, later describing the event in her diary as an “ahmazing” experience. Horrified, I closed the page. Like many whose homepage defaults to Yahoo, this quick scan of a story was a rote action, information via procrastination, almost subconsciously performed every morning before I move on to other things. In this case, the story was so awful that I wanted to get away. Except, it turned out, I couldn’t.

For the next month, I woke up to a barrage of horrifying stories that seemed to signal an epidemic of child torture in America. “3-year-old recovering after swallowing 37 powerful magnets,” Yahoo solemnly informed me on March 5; “Police: Alaska girl locked in frigid bedroom dies” on March 6. Occasionally the child in question survived their ordeal (“7-year-old boy survives brush with tornado in North Carolina”, March 4) but more often than not they were the adversary (“Boy, 9, charged in shooting of third-grade classmate”, February 23; “11-year-old California girl dies after fight with classmate”, February 26; “Texas boy, 12, accused of brandishing loaded gun”, February 27; “10-year-old girl’s death in fight with student ruled homicide”, February 27).  

I rarely clicked on any of these headlines, and at first, I didn’t notice the way they had crept into my Yahoo homepage — and into my mind — until their pervasiveness became impossible to ignore.

That’s when I realized: Yahoo had decided I liked child murder.

Read more.