Re: Reference
which now has become a noun:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_incidents
Good article, but, in Wikipedia's defense, there is little a public-content based website can do to eradicate this problem. On their end, best would be to mitigate it as much as possible while keeping the openness that has fueled its mostly pretty darn good usefulness.
I'd be curious to know if Wikipedia has been improving in this regard. And what additional remedies could be applied.
StackOverflow & co has a partial solution: answer up/down votes.* But that relies on multiple answers being self-contained entries mostly edited by one person, not mingled paragraphs. i.e. it fits their content. And even then, you have the phenomena where the accepted answer turns out to have better alternatives but it gets stuck as THE answer.
My takeaway: Wikipedia as a quickie source is OK, as long as you are not doing anything too important/sensitive with the info or you know the subject somewhat. Unfortunately, journalists, by definition, have a higher duty to be factual than most people, but not always having the domain knowledge to weed out issues. So that leaves El Reg in the lurch - but at least they know that there is a problem.
* I recently took down one of my answers when several people pointed out it wasn't particularly clever. I rode out the first comment or two, but then figured more probably indicated a real problem.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
