It’s a shame that most teachers don’t trust Wikipedia. It’s where I get most of my info, but alas, it does have a bias towards the scienc-y stuff and away from the historical and social for obvious reasons. So I was a little surprised when Cassidy set out to prove to us that Wikipedia was not to be trusted.
He looked up “fat free potato chips olestra” in Google and pointed out to me how credible Wikipedia was.
Okay, first of all, that excerpt is taken out of context. If you look at the actual page, you’ll see that that particular excerpt comes from the footnotes section and links to a pop culture reference on craigslist.
Hah! Score one for the unwashed, wiki-editing masses. Well, actually, I was defending the masses. Okay, the score is still zero for masses then. Hah! Score zero!
I think the issues isn’t so much with using Wikipedia, but using only one source (and not considering the potential bias in said source. Using your Olestra example, if you read the discussion page, it appears there was concern that the page had been edited by the PR department of P&G.)
I think Wikipedia is an excellent starting point for research — iff one then uses the primary sources that are cited in the article. Of course this would necessitate actually reading the other sources, evaluating them and synthesizing the information.
It appears that I’m not alone on this one.