colbert spoof on robustness of wikipedia

Stephen Colbert has turned his attention to the weaknesses of wikipedia, where he encourages viewers to mess with the entry about elephants.

As Tom Coates points out, a look at the change history for the wikipedia entry, and subsequent locking of the entry due to vandalism (yes Colbert, that’s your fault), show that wikipedia is actually fairly robust when it comes to dealing with deliberate attempts to spread misinformation.

The Bloggers was funny and insightful Colbert but encouraging your audience to vandalise a free and useful resource isn’t so clever.