Wikipedia: good source for information or not?

In our Computers and Education class this week we started a discussion on wikis, but more specifically we looked into the controversy over the most well known wiki on the net, Wikipedia. The biggest question we concocted was, 'why is this encyclopedia accepted as a reliable source by some professors and teachers, and not by others?' The problem lies with ambiguity surrounding the sources of the research that is gathered for the information writtin in the wiki entries themselves. In other words, who writes this stuff, and who gets to tell us its truth or fiction? Well, one of the issues is that people don't know if John Smith, the McMaster page head administer has a PhD in English or if he is in fact unemployed and living off KD. But on the contrary, maybe it doesn't matter! If you or I go in and edit Jesse Lumsden's profile in the McMaster wikipedia entry to say he is and always was a nobody instead of the best player to come out of the McMaster Football Program, within seconds this will be undone by somebody. But who is this person? Is he Lumsden's personal assistant? Probably not. Is it Lumsden himself? Just as unlikely.

The point is this: these editors have a passion for either the subject they supervise, and/or keeping the entries clean and accurate. The truth is, Wikipedia pages are more accurate than a lot of other encyclopedias. Prof. Geoffrey Rockwell stated it best when he said that although the information can at times be politically biased and not as well written as published encyclopedias, studies have shown that the information is slightly more up-to-date on Wikipedia.

So a conclusion can be drawn from this. Wikipedia has some solid information to use as a starting ground for your own research. My advice although is this: if you're looking into the subject of something like Mac computers as an example, poke around on the site and read up on what is posted. Get a general idea of what it is that you are trying to learn about, and then look for more resources that are academically accepted that will find you the information that you need. Look at Wikipedia as a slightly more accurate version of the newspaper, but with the same sort of purpose: to provide bare facts. Both can be biased and inaccurate, but often times hold pretty valuable information.