Wikipedia has faced a number of challenges to accuracy lately, particularly from supposedly more “accurate” sources, like newspapers and academics and such. But the scientific journal Nature had an article that said, basically, Wikipedia is just as accurate– or really, inaccurate– as Encyclopedia Britannica. There’s a good discussion about it on the if:book blog, and there was also a good story about it on NPR’s “All Things Considered” yesterday.
Writer, Professor, and Everything Else
FWIW, I didn’t have much sympathy for the supposedly maligned Mr. Seigenthaler. At any time after discovering what was going on, he could have edited the entry himself — that’s the point of tools like Wikipedia. Claiming that Wikipedia is somehow the publisher is approximately the same as suggesting that the owner of a wall is responsible for the graffitti written on it.