Wikipedia, a Surprisingly Reliable Science Resource

At first, an active encyclopedia written by and large on a volunteer basis sounds like an ill-conceived plan.  Considering that so much content on the internet is incorrect, the Wikipedia experiment was bound to fail.  But then, something strange happened: it actually worked.

The internet community, which can always be counted on for lewd YouTube comments dripping of ignorance and disrespect, somehow came together to compile a mass of information that is almost always factual (obviously, different parts of the community are at play here).  Yes, some donor money goes to pay tens of employees to overlook things, and do some fact-checking, but Wikipedia remains a database composed by tens of thousands of anonymous members of our global village, and is perhaps one of the best things to come out of the internet age.

Written mostly by amateurs, who have free time to spare, the volume of information grows at a staggering rate: thousands of pages per hour.  This kind of productivity at no cost, but reasonable quality, helps to explain why Wikipedia has flourished and the Encyclopedia Britannica has become all but irrelevant; oh, and did I mention it's free?

But here is the million-dollar question: "Do I encourage my science students to use Wikipedia?"