Beginning its operations in the new millennium, WIKIPEDIA slowly and steadily carved its place in the worldwide web and is now considered as the very first source of information by most of the people, especially the younger brigade. And it’s really dangerous as well as scary when they take every word written in it as true, without having any information about the way it gets posted or can easily be edited too, by submitting wrong and misguiding text by a volunteer/contributor residing anywhere in the world.
Thankfully in the last few years, reputed schools have been issuing specific instructions to their students as well as the teachers for not copying or using unconfirmed information from Wikipedia as it is. But unfortunately the practice still goes on and you often get to see articles published by otherwise decent websites with content straight away taken from the Wikipedia pages (blindly), without even confirming it from another more reliable source on the internet itself.
For instance while writing on films, IMDB is still a far better source of information (though not entirely authentic with facts) and a collective study of more than one portal should be made before reaching any conclusion.
Giving you the most recent example, there was an article published on “Must Watch Bengali Films” last week on onw of the new web-portals and it included a National Award winning film BHUVAN SHOME (1969) in it, probably taking a quick info from Wikipedia where it is stated as a Bengali film directed by the renowned Mrinal Sen. The picture shared is a screenshot of the film’s Wikipedia page, taken in the afternoon of 28th September 2017 stating the film as a Bengali Drama.
However in reality
BHUVAN SHOME (the name of its lead character) happens to be one of the famous Hindi films made by Sen, that also had a voice over of
Amitabh Bachchan becoming his debut film (as a voice over artist) in the industry. The film’s censor certificate is being shared here too and possibly the mistake at Wikipedia might get rectified soon by a volunteer reading this article or by any other true movie-buff catching it in the coming days.
Yet the point remains that the article was clearly written taking the info from Wikipedia and the writer himself had not seen the film for sure. Otherwise, he would have readily corrected it on his own, very well knowing that it was a Hindi award winning film and not a Bengali venture.
So the moral of the story is that one should not believe anything written at Wikipedia or any other site on the internet and the information needs to be thoroughly checked by confirming it personally or by studying two or three decently reliable sources on the net.
Hope this article raises an alarm and helps many friends in their ongoing and future research projects well in time.
Cheers!
(The article also got featured in UC-News mobile app in September 2017)
