Comments on: Week in review: Wikipedia's woes

The anyone-can-contribute encyclopedia comes under fire for inaccuracies, raising ethical and legal questions.

[open-mind]

Wikipedia is like a public bulletin board.

Should bulletin boards be eliminated because anyone can post info?

If one posting is bogus, does that destroy the value of the other 99,999,999 postings that are accurate?

Should bulletin board makers be sued because people don't understand how they work?

This whole debate is absurd.

[Betty Roper]

Ouch!

Talk about damning something with faint praise.

Jimmy Wales would fall off his Aeron chair if he saw you likening his world-changing People's Reference to a community bulletin board.

Let's play your logic out... Kazaa shouldn't have been sued because it was just a place for thieves to post their warez?

[nicmart]

Wikitoids

Do millions of schoolkids search bulletin boards to locate the
"facts" for their papers? Maybe they should: the boards are no less
reliable than Wikipedia. I dub the site's errors "Wikitoids."

[Earl Benser]

Depends....

For grade school kids, Wikipedia is probably adequate. For high
Sshool kids, Wikipedia is a starting point, but verification is
necessary. For college kids, Wikipedia might provide some initial
clues, but any facts would have to come from established and
credible sources.

Wikipedia serves a purpose, but it is inherently is opinion not fact,
with no guarantee that the opinion is even close to true. That's a
severe handicap for Wikipedia, but that's the way it was built.