Wikipedia Prevents Bloodbath (Not Really, but Kind Of)

By Alicia Dorr in News on Nov 1, 2006 7:15PM

A kid in Skokie is having a pretty bad day today after he was caught threatening the school with violence on Halloween. He hinted that some bad things were going to happen at Niles West High School in an e-mail to Wikipedia, and once the Wikipedia administator alerted the school, the threat had to be taken seriously.

So, even though the threats were empty, the kids had fifteen minutes less of those crappy first-hour classes. The kid was cited for a felony in juvenile court, and all 2,600 parents of children at the school were notified.

We're glad everything turned out all right, but really it just got us to thinking about Wikipedia in general. While we've been happy to see that the Wikipedia police are cracking down on jokesters and a-holes who write in definitions to be funny, we're still pretty skeptical about the site. It's good if you want some general info about something random, but we can't help but wonder how many kids at Niles West have used the Web site as a source in some book report. Alls we're saying is that all the content isn't 100% accurate or infallible, and there are some egregious spelling errors to consider - and, hell, the administrators know that! Anyhow, we just thought we'd say, is all.

Image via Krux.nl.