Russell Beattie has posted about how cool he thinks Wikipedia is. I have to say I agree. One of the things he mentions is his concern over the vandalisation of entries by people with an agenda to push. I would have agreed until we were shown some research by IBM at Lotusphere a couple of years ago. They had spent some time mapping the changes to individual Wikipedia entries over time more into researching ways of displaying changing data over time. One of the things learnt during the research was that, on average, when an entry gets “vandalised” (such as having spam links, adult material or other things added) it takes only just over 5 minutes to be fixed such is the massive audience of people who write and maintain the pages. It truly is a people’s encylopedia.
Obviously it makes sense to not take entries as gospel truth but it is a great place to start looking if you want a basic introduction to any subject you care to think about.
