An Open Wound for an Open-Source Reference

Look up Wikipedia on Wikipedia and you learn that the free online encyclopedia that anyone can contribute to has grown to more than 2.5 million articles and over 100 active editions in different languages. Impressive, but is it true? I have no idea. The entry goes on to acknowledge a slight credibility problem: "Its open nature allows vandalism, inaccuracy, and opinion." In other words, Wikipedia isn't a reliable source for facts, even about itself.

But we do know this: Wikipedia has hit a rough patch. John Seigenthaler, a respected former newspaper editor in Tennessee, recently wrote in USA Today about discovering an entry that erroneously linked him to the assassinations of John and Bobby Kennedy. Brian Chase, a delivery manager in Nashville, apologized for posting the false information, saying it was intended to be a prank. But it didn't look like a prank. On Wikipedia, character assassination looks just like real information.

Is the open-source site doomed by this fatal flaw - no distinction between fact and fiction? The business editor of the New York Times recently instructed his staff not to use Wikipedia as a reference. (Does that mean the paper that purports to be the most reliable news source was relying on an admittedly unreliable source? Yikes.) Wikipedia relies on the notion that the good guys who contribute and police the site for errors outnumber the bad apples and pranksters. It didn't work for the Los Angeles Times, which experimented with wikitorials, online editorials edited by readers. The paper yanked them after just two days because vandals were posting expletives and pornography.

How do you regard Wikipedia now, useful, useless, or somewhere in between? Does your company have a policy about using it? Do you think it should?