Wikipedia.com Review

Wikipedia, the bane of college professors and the darling of the cut-n-paste club.  My personal favorite outlet for idle page surfing.

Personally, I like Oberlin College's approach.   Some of their professors integrated Wikipedia into some of the curriculum by having students take an article from Wikipedia and research it.   As they do that, the students develop discernment as they struggle to separate fact from fiction.     It doesn't take long before the students learn to question what they read or hear instead of blindly accepting everything as factual.  The faculty learned to appreciate how much of the information in Wikipedia is actually true.

Having been involved with it for a few years now, I believe the quality is roughly equivalent to much of what we see and hear, some truth, some gossip, some outright lies.   Encyclopedia Britannica didn't do all that much better than Wikipedia when their facts were checked.  I suspect most school textbooks would not do well either if they were scrutinized. 

Bottom line is always take everything you read or hear with a grain of salt.