Wikipedia is a site struggling to gain credibility when its very nature is hopelessly erroneous. Brock Read's article "Can Wikipedia Ever Make the Grade?" highlights the main points of Wikipedia's history from its conception to its current fight for accuracy and acceptance amongst scholars. There have been a lot of complaints against Wikipedia's methods of obtaining information and the absence of a serious scholarly review board. Brock outlines some of the more epic mistakes of Wikipedia and why such mistakes occur. While there are teams of people checking pages for errors all the time there are some pages that do not get checked for months. Such was the case for John Seigenthaler Sr. whose article on Wikipedia contained some very false information about his involvement in the Kennedy assassination (he wasn't involved at all). Other problems the site faces is its lack of stability. "Someone can cite Wikipedia, but there is no guarantee that the entry will remain the same over time," how can Wikipedia hope to be used in an academic setting if it cannot be cited or cannot assure the information found on a page one day will not be there the next day?
I was surprised to hear a lot of the facts Read presented in this article. The fact that there have been studies about Wikipedia was really interesting to me. Everybody jokes about Wikipedia but really it isn't too bad of a place to find information. All I know is that when I find something from Wikipedia I always check to see if it is anywhere else before trusting it. Personally, I use Wikipedia as a place to find general information about a topic that I know nothing about, scanning a page for basic details that will help me understand what to look for elsewhere.
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