Why Wikipedia will survive the storm

Here we go again: The recent controversies over Wikipedia, which began with a disputed entry involving a former aide to Robert F. Kennedy, are being criticized by mainstream media organizations that just don't get it.

The online encyclopedia's errors, they say, show that the communal, open-source approach to information doesn't work because control is lost in the wilds of the Internet. What they seem incapable of understanding is that errors and misinformation are not exclusive to any medium, online or off, communal or closed. News.com's Charles Cooper noted poignantly in a column last week, for example, that an encyclopedia entry he read as a child was "nonsensical, if not borderline racist."

Will Wikipedia eventually sued on charges of defamation? Almost certainly--just as newspapers, television networks and other large information distributors have been taken to court for generations. Will the case prove that Wikipedia can never be trusted? Hardly.

The New York Times, the Washington Post, CBS News and many others have weathered far more egregious circumstances than those that have befallen Wikipedia. The general public has simply learned to be wary of all information from any form of media. And the those outlets that have the strongest credibility will, in the end, have the most followers.

Blog community response:

"Problem that CNN doesn't see is that if the wrong article was published in the normal, big 20+ volume 'Bolshaja Sovetskaja Enciklopedia' (The Big Soviet Encyclopedia), he would never get a change in the article. Perhaps he may have got a 'correction' piece of paper, stuck in a volume of the printed edition, which will be published six years after the original. What Wikipedia gives to the readers, is that its articles can always be changed."
--Blogs of Internet Society--Bulgaria

"Democracy is a bitch. And Wikipedia has been the center of some controversies lately. For every person that volunteers to help police the articles there's another person who will happily deface them. Such is the way of the people and unfortunately, it's the price we pay for a history of the people, by the people."
--Dasspunk

"Just because Wikipedia is online does not mean common sense is useless. Use common sense, just like anything else."
--Vox in Sox