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Defining Reliability In a Wild Wiki World

By Frank Ahrens
Sunday, September 10, 2006; Page F07

In the wacky Wiki world that is the Internet, it's hard to know which information is reliable and which isn't.

User-created content, such as entries found in Wikipedia, the open-to-most online encyclopedia, comes with varying degrees of trustworthiness. Wikipedia, for instance, relies on a number of citizen editors, who act as a broad peer-review process for entries, but it's still possible to get something by them that's just plain wrong. Eventually, the entry might be removed but maybe not; Wikipedia boasts more than 1 million articles.

At the same time, Wikipedia has become enormously popular, especially with younger users. Type just about any topic into the Google search engine, and its Wikipedia entry will pop up on the first or second page of results.

This has alarmed many teachers . . .