Wikipedian issues

There's been a bit of a flap over Wikipedia in the news of late. Seems that an biography of John Siegenthaler, Jr. was posted saying that he had been involved in the John F. Kennedy assassination. The poster of the article claims that it was posted as a prank that seems not to have been caught by Wikipedia's typically reliable article policies. There have always been some concerns about the site's open-source editing and possibilities for abuse, and Wikipeidians are aware of such concerns.

A number of websites express their problems with Wikipedia. Various media outlets have also done stories about Wikipedia - NPR, USA Today, cnet.com.

Wikipedia has made changes of late to make things a little less open source, requiring registration for editing of their articles.

I've been a fan of Wikipedia since I first heard about it about a year ago, and I'm happy to see that a recent study suggests that science articles in Wikipedia is not significantly less accurate than those in Britanica.

For the sake of full disclosure, I should probably point out that I have written article on Wikipedia and am a registered member.