Should journalists use Wikipedia for research and factchecking? The debate about the validity of the online encyclopedia has been bubbling along nicely for a couple of years now.
Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, usually stays out of the to and fro about the worth of the collectively compiled information resource, but he recently stepped in to respond to stiff criticism from the author Nicholas Carr, who says that although the encyclopedia is useful to consult "to get a quick gloss on a subject", nevertheless: "At a factual level it's unreliable, and the writing is often appalling. I wouldn't depend on it as a source, and I certainly wouldn't recommend it to a student writing a research paper."
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