Wikipedia.com Review

Wikipedia is great as a starting point for research or for quick answers.  In the same spirit as traditional encyclopedias, it isn't meant to be an in-depth authoritative reference on its topics, but sort of an overview.  If you're looking for really in-depth information on something specific or if your answer absolutely positively must be true without dispute, wikipedia should not be the only reference you check.  But if you're like me, most of what you look up on an average day isn't the kind of life or death situation where you need an iron-clad guarantee your answer is right or the kind of thing where you need to know every little detail about something.  You just want quick answers to some day to day questions.  Wikipedia has tons of great fairly basic, well organized, easy to navigate, information on just about any topic you can come up with. 

I like that it's able to be edited and anyone can contribute.  I've edited and added to my own hometown's wikipedia article (the history was pitifully sparse, so I added a couple of lines.).  That sort of collaborative editing makes it so that the parts of things that are important get included that might have been skipped over by traditional encyclopedia editors. 

By the same token, there's no system in place to verify people's qualifications to edit the articles.  People can add and change whatever they want. But people generally only edit articles that they know something about.  People are busy.  I don't know of anyone who has time to write wikipedia articles on things they aren't interested in, and therefore usually fairly knowledgeable about.  But in any large communtiy, there are always exceptions.  There are people that sometimes know less than they think they do, and people that are just bad eggs or think it's funny to mess with entries.  Luckily, topics that are prone to being vandalized are usually locked so that only known (presumably more trustworthy) users can edit them. 

I love wikipedia and think it's one of the best general information resources on the internet.