I've been interested in the Wikipedia pages for at least two years. The whole idea of "citizen encyclopediasm" intrigued me and I've generally found its content consistent with my knowledge on matters. But I hear about glaring errors, and a recent hub-ub that got press in U.S.A. Today has thrown disturbing light on the endeavor. NYT Link. Excerpts:
Wikipedia is a kind of collective brain, a repository of knowledge, maintained on servers in various countries and built by anyone in the world with a computer and an Internet connection who wants to share knowledge about a subject. Literally hundreds of thousands of people have written Wikipedia entries.
Mistakes are expected to be caught and corrected by later contributors and users. . . .
It has, by most measures, been a spectacular success. Wikipedia is now the biggest encyclopedia in the history of the world. As of Friday, it was receiving 2.5 billion page views a month, and offering at least 1,000 articles in 82 languages. The number of articles, already close to two million, is growing by 7 percent a month. And Mr. Wales said that traffic doubles every four months.
Still, the question of Wikipedia, as of so much of what you find online, is: Can you trust it?
And beyond reliability, there is the question of accountability. [One person defamed by Wikipedia] found that his "biographer" was anonymous. He learned that the writer was a customer of BellSouth Internet, but that federal privacy laws shield the identity of Internet customers, even if they disseminate defamatory material. And the laws protect online corporations from libel suits.
The article offers a common sense solution: Just view Wikipedia as one source and never the final source. Sounds right to me. Get general information from it, but don't base any articles on it, bet your paycheck on it, or base important beliefs on it.
