The claims for Wikipedia are naive at best. I'f you've spent any time writing or editing Wiki articles - I have - you know how messy the process is. There's a certain kind of posessive troll that is drawn to Wikipedia. Once they add material, they protect it at all costs, and you can bet that they have more patience than you do. The idea that well-meaning and knowledgable people police Wikipedia is the hype - not to be believed. The articles can still be useful - as a start. If you want to know how Wikipedia works, spend some time observing the Delete/Keep process - it's like watching sausages being made.

Wikipeda may be better than Yahoo Answers, but the author here paints a prettier picture than it deserves.

I agree with JonFrum about the "possessive trolls" have a lot more patience than the "well-meaning and knowledgeable people". For awhile I tried editing articles in my professional field, but then when I would go back a few days/weeks later to see how they'd evolved, would find troll-prints all over them.

Since I have an intellectually demanding full-time job (as well as my family and social life), I can't compete with people who obviously don't. So the benefits of us "well-meaning and knowledgeable" types get wiped out, we get discouraged and go away, and the slippery slope downward begins.

Interesting. I, too, have edited, and have in fact been involved in editing wars with people who would immediately (it seemed) change anything I happened to correct. One of the most egregious examples involved some person's (or persons') insistence on going back over and over to the entry for a well-known woman poet and making sure that every reference to her called her by first name (as in "Emily lived in Amherst," though that's not the poet I'm talking about). Another entry cut and pasted three paragraphs from a source that, after copyright has expired, has entered in the public domain. I added a citation, somebody removed it, I tried again, etc., and I finally posted a question. The editors seemed unaware that a source, in the public domain or not, must still be cited. (The reason I knew about the plagiarism was that I had accused one of my poor, dumb freshman of plagiarism. He shrieked, sent me to Wikipedia [though I had told them NOT to use it for real papers], and asked for a re-write.)

My theory: a lot of the entries are kids' high school papers and they are getting credit for posting them (as they do for posting Reader Reviews at Amazon).