It wasn't so long ago that Wikipedia was actually a nice source of information. You could find out about particular sciences, countries, history, companies, organizations, even people and you could reasonably trust what was written about each. Why? A number of subject matter experts (SME) would discuss what the text of a particular subject should convey, and come to a conclusion, being the final text available on the interweb.
However lately Wikipedia vandalism is actually making headlines:
- companies changing their corporate histories to hide their failures, or scandals
- people changing their own biographies to tell the story they want to tell, or change biographies of other's to insult them
- pictures and pages getting added, deleted, changed, just because people don't like the layout of the set
I guess by now the number of pages on Wikipedia has already passed critical mass, so that SMEs cannot feasibly keep track of everything, and prevent people from intentionally changing the information on the site for their own gain, instead of for the greater good: a wider, deeper distribution of knowledge, for free. The longer this keeps up, people will be less inclined to share information in the first place, undermining the very basis of Wikipedia.
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