Wikipedia

How accurate is Wikipedia? This is not an idle question for journalists to ask or even for students who write papers to ask. Just how accurate are the nearly four million articles on Wikipedia?

John Seigenthaler was the founding editorial director of USA Today and served as an assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Imagine the pain he felt when he read: "he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby." This false and malicious "biography" appeared under his name for 132 days on Wikipedia. And his son, who is a journalist with NBC News, told him that the same malicious text also appeared on Reference.com and Answers.com.

To add insult to injury, Seigenthaler found that there was no way to know who wrote this awful statement. And he found that federal law protects online corporations from libel lawsuits.

University student Shane Fitzgerald discovered that once an erroneous post is placed on Wikipedia, it can travel around the world. He posted a phony quote a few hours after a French composer died. It flew straight to dozens of blogs and newspaper websites in Britain, Australia, and India. It is worth mentioning that the administrators at Wikipedia caught the quote's lack of attribution and removed it.

It turns out that these gross errors are the exception rather than the rule. The journal Nature set out to check the accuracy of Wikipedia. They concluded that it covers scientific topics about as accurately as the Encyclopedia Britannica. Doing a side-by-side comparison of articles, the researchers concluded that the average scientific entry in Wikipedia contained four errors or omissions, while Britannica had three.

The lesson to be learned is to check your sources with other sources. Just because it is in print or online doesn't always mean it is true. I'm Kerby Anderson, and that's my point of view.