I see this story about US Government staff editing (positively and negatively) biographies of various political figures that appear in Wikipedia. A sign of its success I guess.
What is interesting is that when some of the editing was considered to be politically motivated, a Congress spokesperson said “I presume that if they did not want people to edit, they wouldn’t allow you to edit.”
They ? People ? You ?
Talk about missing the point.
Now who’s paranoid ?
What happened to we ?
Still it shows the limitations as well as strengths of Wikipedia. All information is “political” – this way the debate about the words happens in public, until commonly accepted “facts” evolve. Wikipedia will never be perfect, but it will always be getting there.
Wikipedia helps along the illusion that, “It must be true — I saw it on the Internet!” The fact that anyone can come along and change an entry is a severe weakness of wikis in general. No matter how deep the pooling of ignorance and opinions, it will hever be a high quality resource. Unfortunately a small fraction of internet users have any inkling of how to judge the veracity or authenticity of websites. Your mileage may vary, of course.