Design Meme

I was speaking at the Ontario Universities Computing Conference (OUCC) today about Knowledge & Learning in the Internet Age. I think it’s an interesting topic and there was some good discussion, but an hour didn’t leave us all that much time to cover the material in much detail.

During my presentation I talked about Wikipedia and how the accuracy of some topics can be in question—particularly for politically sensitive topics, or the entries for politicians.

I gave the example of George W.Bush, who’s discussion page includes the disclaimer:

“This is a controversial topic which can lead to heated debate. If you are about ready to explode, please stop for a minute, take a deep breath, and relax your eyebrows. Repeat as necessary.”

In an interesting coincidence, today’s keynote was given by Bob Rae, former premier of Ontario and leadership candidate for the Liberal Party of Canada. During his talk, he told an anecdote about a time when he was introduced at an event and they said he was the graduate of a school he had never attended. When he asked where they got the erroneous information he was told: Wikipedia. When he checked his entry, he found a number of errors.

During the question and answer session that followed the keynote, I explained I had just given a presentation that had included Wikipedia and politicians, and asked Bob to expand on his story and tell us what he had done after finding the errors on his page. He explained that his wife, Arlene, was kind enough to edit the entry for him and correct the mistakes.

On my way out of the room, one of the other attendees said to me: I’ve just posted a note about your conversation on Bob Rae’s wikipedia page. I laughed at first, but then I remembered the wireless network in the lecture hall. He had posted something about it.

And now this will be an interesting anecdote for me the next time I’m at at a conference and talk about Wikipedia. Or Bob Rae.