Word: wikipedia
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...Wikipedia operates on a revolutionary principle: Any visitor to the site may add to it or edit it. Any visitor can create new articles, change old ones, add pictures or sounds, and so on. As a defense against malicious ne’er-do-wells who cruise around the ‘net with nothing better to do than delete whole pages about Confucius or Kant, the entire revision history of every article—that is, a copy of every version of the article that has ever been posted—is available for perusal alongside the current draft...
...Wikipedia also contains lies. I know, because I’m responsible for one of them: As of this writing, the year in which Yale University was founded according to the encyclopedia is not 1701 as it rightfully should be but 1702; I’ve committed my own personal one-year slight against the prestige of our younger sibling in New Haven...
...Orwellian revisionist stance has broader implications than what it might mean for the minute differences in the perceptions of Ivy League institutions, however. Wikipedia is like a microcosm for the world wide web: a massive collection of informative pages temptingly authoritative in form but perhaps nonetheless deceptive on the back end. And so we’re forced to ask ourselves, to what extent can we rely on this great resource...
Some prominent figures have taken an aggressive stance on the question of Wikipedia’s trustworthyness. In the site’s defense stands a huge corps of writers in a variety of fields, including such weighty entities as the Michigan State Supreme Court (which cited Wikipedia for information about “positional aslphyxia” in a 2004 opinion). These people may not explicitly lend their credence to the project (though some certainly have), but they give it de facto support by including it on their works cited pages...
Still, an increasingly large cadre of prominent academics has stepped forward to question the acceptibility of this trend. Famed UCLA Law Professor Eugene Volokh has posted mildly bitter invective to his weblog slamming court citations of Wikipedia as absurd given the nature of the source, but the most florid prose on the subject comes perhaps from Robert McHenry, chief of the (less and less popular—let’s keep our private interests straight) Encyclopedia Britannica. McHenry has compared Wikipedia to a public restroom: Such a facility may be obviously dirty, he has said, or it may look...