[astrec]

Is "Site complies with law, wins law suit" less of a story than "Judge cites Wikipedia definitions in ruling"?

In this city a high school student who cites Wikipedia without a secondary source gets a (provisional) F.

If Wikipedia is an authority sufficient for the judiciary the world really has transitioned from the Britannica era.

[jrockway]

I don't think that's particularly important. What an IP address is and what a Flash video are weren't really important to the case. It sounds more like the judge was curious.

If Wikipedia was vandalized and the judge based his ruling on incorrect information, that would be grounds for an appeal, I'm sure.

Wikipedia may not be 100% correct, but I think we all use it as a starting point. A lot of times it is correct, and it gives us the background information we need to understand other sources. Not something I'm going to complain about. (Cue the inevitable responeses -- "I hate the Wikipedia admins", or "I'm so smart I never need to look anything up." Yeah, yeah. Tell someone who cares.)

[boredguy8]

Print encyclopedias are as flawed as Wikipedia in lots of important ways. From an old post of mine in response to an anti-wiki article (http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=111504A)

The article by Robert McHenry misses the point in a phenominal way. In order to demonstrate the flaws of the system, one would need to show where an earlier edition said something to the effect of, "There is a lack of clarity regarding the birth date of Hamilton. While we know his birth month and day, there is some debate over the exact year. Dates vary between 1755 and 1757, but as Hamilton himself used 1757, that will be the date of reference used in this article." was deleted. Had he submitted such a change himself, the article would have been somewhat better.

As for statements of opinion, shall we reject "The New Encyclopedia Britannica" because it says, "Korean artists were generally inferior to the Chinese and Japanese in technical perfection and precision"? I won't even bother to list the host of other errors in that edition on a single topic: Korea. (http://kennedy.byu.edu/staff/peterson/Multivol/Multibooks.ht...)

Anyway, the point is that until one demonstrates that good information is regularly being destroyed by bad information, one has not built a case for the need for change.