Wikipedia and a grain of salt

My son called the other day and our conversation found its way to Wikipedia. My son is a student at the University of Kentucky in Lexington and he was expressing his pride that he is currently getting straight A's. I too expressed my pride.

He explained that taking his notes and retyping them helped him remember and thanked me for that advice. Then he explained that sometimes there are holes in his notes and used Wikipedia to fill in the gaps. I explained that Wikipedia articles are written by volunteers and a recent study found that they could be as much as 39% inaccurate. (I cannot recall the reference but it was a recent story about text book encyclopedias vs. Wikipedia and the error rate of each.)

I explained to my son that the authors of those articles could be anyone. It could be a 6th grade student who likes to write online, or a monk in the mountains somewhere. We talked for a long time and I made sure he understood that I wasn't suggesting that he stop using it, I just wanted him to know that some information can be flawed and he should check his text books for accuracy. (Yes, I know text books are flawed too but the assigned textbook is the source from which he will be graded.)

Then this morning, I happened upon a USAToday article that pretty well summed up my evolving opinion on Wikipedia. Written by a man who was defamed on the site in a very severe manner he writes:

"At age 78, I thought I was beyond surprise or hurt at anything negative said about me. I was wrong. One sentence in the biography was true. I was Robert Kennedy's administrative assistant in the early 1960s. I also was his pallbearer. It was mind-boggling when my son, John Seigenthaler, journalist with NBC News, phoned later to say he found the same scurrilous text on Reference.com and Answers.com."

You'll have to read the article to find out what he was accused of and how he handled it, but to my point, Wikipedia is great and a very useful source of information. It is amazing. There are some checks and balances in that the same community of volunteers hold each other accountable by challenging each others articles. They also seem to be adding more source citations which is a good thing. At the end of the day however, one must consider the grain of salt when reading the articles at Wikipedia.