Oh, get real, geni.
Type "Wikipedia" into the forum search and find out how many mentions there are, and pick a handful of the factual articles and see how many of them rely on Wikipedia only as the sole source for the assertions made. Count the number of Wikipedia mirrors that simply copy the data from Wikipedia without either fact-checking or content-editing it.
I think that the evidence that
A lot of people, including people here, seem to take Wikipedia as an authoritative source
is nearly omnipresent -- enough so that I'm going to let you do your own homework.
I've contributed to Wikis -- you know that, you've seen my work on Skepticwiki. I've also written encyclopedia articles. They're completely different kettles of fish, and part of the reason I
don't trust Wikipedia is because I neither know nor trust the person that wrote it. There have been times when some moron here on the JREF forum has been mis-reading a badly-written (or simply factually inaccurate) Wiki statement, which he cites, and I've been strongly tempted just to go edit the entry on Wikipedia and fix it -- and see if the idiot changes his opinon once it's in a different forum.
Part of the problem is that the advantages you cite for Wikipedia, the content updates, really aren't. Encyclopediae aren't
supposed to be up-to-the-minute accurate, exactly because they're supposed to rely upon widely-accepted and stable facts. Cutting edge research results are too unstable, since an experiment I run today may be overturned tomorrow. Encyclopediae are supposed to re[resent a long-term, factually based, consensus opinion among experts. Wikipedia represents all but four of those.
The other fundamental problem with Wikipedia is the so-called Neutral Point of View, which in practice means that the ideal article strikes a balance between fact and fiction. There is no "NPOV" about the question of the half-life of the neutron, whether the moon landings were hoaxed, or whether or not HIV causes AIDS. Obviously in areas where there is no clearly-understood correct answer -- either more research is needed, as in the case of an open scientific question, or the available evidence is ambiguous and unclear, as in most questions of current events, or questions where no fact-based evidence is available, as in questions of esthetics -- then it's reasonable to discuss "all points of view."
But in areas where factual accuracy can reasonably be an issue, Wikipedia falls down precisely because the NPOV demands that fact compromise with fiction.
History News Network put it pretty well: "Wikipedia’s policy of neutrality works to the advantage of fringe groups."
Did you read the WikiEN-l discussion regarding this issue before you so blithely dismissed the complaints about the two articles (Bill Gates, and Jane Fonda)?
The readers of the WikiEN-l accept the criticisms about this as valid -- in the general case and are discussing the possible solution. Stan Shebs had a very good point
here:
2. We need a way to discourage well-meaning but less-able editors from crumbling good articles. On my watchlist I see a lot of editors (some logins, some anons) adding nonsequiturs or redundancies, randomly rearranging text, adding useless templates en masse, etc. They're not vandalism, but they're not improvements either, and most of them I just let slide by because they're stylistic rather than factual, and it's disheartening to argue with people about style over and over. A vicious circle though, because if I feel like an article is inexorably going downhill, I'm less and less motivated to try to halt the slide. Not quite the same as article rating, it seems more like we want articles to gradually get harder to edit as they gradually get better
That's exactly the point of a traditional encyclopedia's peer review system. I was honored to be asked to write the various encyclopedia articles. But that's because it really was an honor -- I was personally selected by the overall series editor because he considers me to be acceptably knowledgeable in my speciality and to be an acceptably good writer. He also closely read the draft article I sent him and suggested some changes, mostly stylistic. He's performing the necessary gatekeeper function to keep the quality of the articles in his encyclopedia high, rather than allowing any lunkhead with an opinion to adjust what I wrote.
The stated goal of Wikipedia is to be "better than Britannica" -- in accuracy, style, and currency. Currency, of course, Wikipedia has won -- hands down. But how can you enforce standards of accuracy and style without using a gatekeeper?
