Talk:Sigrid Undset

On the morning of 8th January, 2007 I made the following two changes on Wikipedia:

1. On its page for existentialism, I changed the first sentence from "Existentialism is a philosophical movement that deals with human freedom" to "Existentialism is a philosophical movement that deals with human existence".

2. On its page for Sigrid Undset, in the first sentence I changed the year when she got Nobel prize in literature from 1928 (correct) to 1927 (incorrect).

Both changes were reverted on January 12. The first change is certainly more involved. As far as I know, it is misleading to say that existentialism deals with human freedom. It deals with human freedom also. But this is not the first sentence one writes on the topic. (Indeed, the whole article in wikipedia is unsatisfactory. I would definitely prefer this article on Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.) Of course, what I wrote is more misleading. But surely, thousands of people since 8th January have read the first sentence and retained only that confusing piece of information.The second is more straightforward. It alarms me that no one has corrected it yet. A Google search on Sigrid Undet returns the Wikipedia page as the third result. Many people would click on this ahead of the first two results. It is conceivable that lots of people have looked at this page in the last five days and went away with the wrong information. A little bit of checking (indeed, even reading the Wikipedia page till the end) would correct them. But of course few people would actually check. This is the crux of the Wikipedia phenomenon: it pays no attention to the matter of expertise.[1]