[WikiEN-l] Irony, noun: When a judge discovers the existence of disclaimers

[Mathias Schindler]

http://www.uscfc.uscourts.gov/Opinions/Allegra/06/ALLEGRA.Campbell.pdf

The articles that the Special Master culled from the Internet do not –
at least on their face
remotely meet this reliability requirement. Consider the item on
"febrile seizures" that she added from the Dictionary of Neurology,
www.explore-medicine.com. Although that website no longer exists, the
exhibit introduced by the Special Master indicates that its
information was drawn from Wikipedia.com, a website that allows
virtually anyone to upload an article into what is essentially a free,
online encyclopedia. A review of the Wikipedia website reveals a
pervasive and, for our purposes, disturbing series of disclaimers,
among them, that: (i) any given Wikipedia article "may be, at any
given moment, in a bad state: for example it could be in the middle of
a large edit or it could have been recently vandalized;" (ii)
Wikipedia articles are "also subject to remarkable oversights and
omissions;" (iii) "Wikipedia articles (or series of related articles)
are liable to be incomplete in ways that would be less usual in a more
tightly controlled reference work;" (iv) "[a]nother problem with a lot
of content on Wikipedia is that many contributors do not cite their
sources, something  that makes it hard for the reader to judge the
credibility of what is written;" and (v) "many articles commence their
lives as partisan drafts" and may be "caught up in a heavily
unbalanced viewpoint."