Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, has admitted that the much loved "free encyclopedia" has at least some quality problems. To some of us, this is nothing new. I've had more than one student rely on Wikipedia for accurate information for a paper, and it always ends up the same way: "well, I got it off of Wikipedia, thinking it was good...".

And therein lies the problem. If you keep in mind that anyone, and I mean anyone, can edit a Wikipedia entry, then you are treading on dangerous ground if you're going to cite it as a source of fact. While it's true that errors often get corrected, they don't always, and what happens in the meantime is that bad info sits there, misinforming people. Of course, this isn't true just in the case of Wikipedia. It's a problem online, in general. I recently was party to an argument over the historicity of Jesus, and one person used a source that claimed that Philo of Alexandria lived in Jerusalem. He's called Philo of Alexandria for a reason, you know.[] 

I used to be such an unadulterated fan of Wikipedia you know. The idea of an open source online reference that grew on a daily basis was quite an attractive one back in the day. But in recent times I've become wary of the encyclopaedia anyone can edit, and not simply because of a few high profile choice edits.

Whatever about libel and congressional cherry picking amidst the many articles of this once noble enterprise, what really gets me about Wikipedia is that I can't trust it on most issues. There are so many agendas, axes to grind and purely mischievous vandals that 90% of what I would be interested in reading about - history, politics and so on - is tripe. To read an article on a contentious subject one can pick out bias, attempted compromise and ultimate failure almost immediately. Wade into the "Talk" page, where these edits are discussed, and you are confronted with chaos. There are too many vested interests at stake, and from the War on Terror to the Welfare State one will find an army of people taking one view or another entering into what are known as "Revert Wars", where they revert any edits back to the version which suits them.

From self-interest to political interest one can find "POV" (Point of View) shading almost every major article that touches on the live wires of our society. Thus I wouldn't trust anything that's even half-way current or ongoing on Wikipedia.

For one, the facts can be skewed. Secondly, the article can change overnight depending on how organised a campaign is launched against an article (and they do happen.)

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