Serendipity35

Is your school on Wikipedia? A lot of colleges have an entry - even if they didn't officially decide they wanted to have an entry.

NJIT has an entry there at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NJIT. It was not created by anyone at the university and no one at NJIT was assigned to "monitor" it.

When I did a workshop on wikis last Feb, some of the communications & web services staff at NJIT were present and I asked about it. They said they had looked at it, thought it was accurate and didn't want to be responsible for it.

For that workshop session, I had been deliberately changing some information on our entry for the two weeks prior. I changed the president's name a few times etc. as an experiment to see if the Wikipedia community would respond and fix it. They did - within 24 hours things were back.

Wikipedia does allow you to monitor pages and be notified when changes occur. I set that up for another topic that I have a personal interest in following.

I thought about all this again recently when I read a blog post from Brock Read at The Chronicle called "Policing Penn's Wikipedia Page". Here's part of that post:

The University of Pennsylvania has plenty of officials — its archivist, its admissions director, its entire public-relations staff — who might be inclined to tinker with the institution's entry in Wikipedia. But so far, they've all managed to resist the temptation. And that's just as it should be, according to Dan Smith. Mr. Smith, a software engineer who lives near Boston, has made an unlikely crusade out of purging colleges' Wikipedia articles of "irritating braggadocio" inserted by proud alumni and protective employees. He's edited plenty of hyperbolic college articles, according to The Daily Pennsylvanian, and sparred with more than his share of academic boosters...

Actually, I have no problem with colleges monitoring their Wikipedia entries for accuracy. In fact, I think they SHOULD do that on a regular basis. Adding "irritating braggadocio" is another issue entirely.

Colleges need to monitor what goes online under their name. We have no real control over what photos on Flickr or videos on YouTube get tagged as "NJIT" but we should be aware of the content, and on a site like Wikipedia that allows you to correct errors, those errors should be corrected.