http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Rodham_Clinton_controversies#Anti-Semitic_slurs

I still wouldn’t rely on it for anything more than providing a brief overview of a subject for recreational purposes.

As for wikipedia, it’s like the internet. It’s a fantastic reference if you know something about the subject before reading about it, because then you can filter out dodgy statements and biased points of view. The problem is, of course, if you don’t know anything about a subject and are using Wikipedia to educate you, then you’re succeptible to various biases and inaccuracies which inevitably slip in.

Having said that, there are articles there which are truly fantastic, pages like the one on global warming and other science related topics which are fastidiously referenced and edited/monitored by people very knowledgble in their fields. The process also does lend itself to continuous improvement. A recent example, I went to Wikipedia a week or so ago to get some background on Gonzales v Raich, the Supreme Court medial marijuhana case from last year. The page at the time was appallingly biased (this version) and terribly incomplete. Now, having monitored and been involved in edit wars on other Commerce-Clause related topics I knew libertarian types had a habit of inserting their POV into those articles. I’m an Australian law student so I knew enough to recognise the POV, but not enough to edit it myself so I sent a shout out to another user I had seen editing US commerce clause topics. Within 2 days he had done a ~1000 word re-write with good references and it’s now a reasonably good article.

Long comment! Short answer, I use Wikipedia but it’s not a source to be trusted. But if you don’t trust it, it can be useful :)

Having said that I do however greatly appreciate the intent and goal of Wikipedia.

Sorry you feel that you were suckered. That was not my intention at all.

My point is that its very easy for information to be manipulated on Wikipedia -either on the inclusion or exculsion side. Just because a lot of people believe it doesn’t make something a fact. Look at the recent flap over Bree/lonelygirl15 on YouTube.

Inaccuracies and mistakes may be corrected over time by the Wikipedia community. But that is only useful to people who repeatedly check an entry or who follow a subject.

The person who uses Wikipedia one or two times to research something for a book report, say, or who just wants quick background, will take the inaccuracy as fact. The editorial process involved in putting together a traditional encyclopedia is meant to catch these errors. The final published product should be more reliable for quick facts.

Further, the research process (by which knowledge on the subject comes to be know) used by the contributors to traditional encyclopedias has proven to work very well for our society. It is also a well-vetted, agreed upon standard for our society.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has surrounded himself with an inner circle of administrators that he initially dubbed “the cabal,â€Â? and they ruthlessly enforce an institutional bias in favor of neo-conservatism, laissez-faire economics …

Absolute lap-drooling nonsense, and anyone who thinks a cabal directs Wikipedia has no idea what Wikipedia is.

Jimmy Wales, whatever your personal opinion of the man, has been a champion for the rights of pro-democracy bloggers in China.

Unlike Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and people who complain about “laissez-faire economics”.

As has been said, apply common-sense filters…

I’ve blogged further on this at http://www.vertabase.com/blog/wikipedia-knowledge-or-hype/

Wiki can be an excellent source of information but it something you read there sounds fishy, it probably is. After all anyone can add to it.

There is no immediate editorial control over the content, but editors let all kinds of crap be published. On the internet, you can talk back to crap.

Take this wikipedia article on Philip K. Dick. It contains a lot of good information (some of which I contributed) but it suffers from inadequate sources and contains a few inaccuracies and lots of omissions. It’s a work in progress. I intend to contribute more to it and I’m sure a lot of other people do, too. You can peek under the hood of the process on the discussion page and see the problems involved in interpreting a very difficult subject. In fact, right at the top of it some nit-picker is quibbling over something I wrote. Good for him.

So you would learn a lot from this article, though you might be misled on a few points, and some dimensions of Dick are neglected. But buy a set of standard encyclopedias (obsolete by the time they ship) and see how much Dick you get.

Sometimes it’s about the only place you can find information on something…because some fanatic out there has a thing for beeswax butterfly sculptures or something equally obscure.

I haven’t really done any investigation into its editing capabilities or the ability to reject inappropriate edits, but I suspect being open source that methodology continuously improves…unlike Microsoft and its spawn.