There have been some embarrassing gaffes that cast serious doubts about its reliability. As part of a prank in 2005, journalist John Seigenthaler was described for months as having been involved in the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy. U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy erroneously was reported on Wikipedia as being dead after he collapsed during a lunch on President Barack Obama's Inauguration Day. And just weeks ago, the Wikipedia entry for former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw said his longtime marriage was ended and that he'd had an affair with Diane Sawyer. The information was false and also apparently the work of a Wiki-vandal.
But by and large, people, including - to the dismay of teachers - many students, have come to rely on the site as the absolute authority.
Whether or not the users realize it, several core tenets shape Wikipedia, says Lih, a media professor at the University of Hong Kong and previously at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.
One is "NPOV," no point of view in articles. Another is "no original research"; it has to come from established sources elsewhere - a tenet broken when someone updated Tim Russert's Wikipedia page to note his death a half-hour before there was any public notification of it June 13. Another is that a topic is only worthy of defining if it has received significant coverage by reliable sources.
Lih marvels at the irony that traditional media, with its bylined stories, layers of editing and stringent ethics codes, began to lose the trust of news consumers, who seem more than willing to take as gospel the information they peruse casually online, written by someone anonymously or under a pseudonym.
Communal information-sharing hardly began with the Internet, Lih points out. He cites Simon Winchester's research into the Oxford English Dictionary: To outdo the dictionaries of Noah Webster and Samuel Johnson in the 1850s, the Oxford English creators posted an appeal at libraries and bookshops to seek entries from volunteer writers. They built an oak shelving system to hold the hundreds of scraps of paper that began arriving daily. A Civil War survivor, who was later institutionalized in an asylum after shooting a man to death, turned out to be one of the most prolific - and accurate - contributors over 20 years.
