While it's hysterically funny, and they deserved what they got for not reading what they copied, don't laugh too much. As Wikipedia has become successful, the percentage of people who understand _anything_ about Wikipedia is declining. _We need to educate them._ Somehow. It would be interesting to have a poll of the people who used Wikipedia in the last week and see how many of them even noticed the the caption "edit this page" or the slogan "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." I'd bet that _the majority have not_. Impossible, you say? Heck, everyone knows about Wikipedia, Colbert jokes about it, nobody would get the joke. Well, not everybody watches Colbert. I suspect that at this point in time the vast majority of Wikipedia accesses are via Google. People just type something they want to know, Wikipedia comes up as one of the top links, they click it, they read the article. Many of them _may not even notice that it's in something called Wikipedia_ In some vague way an aura of authority is cast over the article simply by being endorsed, as it were, by Google. People don't consciously think "it must be true or it wouldn't be a high-ranking Google result." The authority is enhanced by Wikipedia's professional-looking appearance. People don't _seriously link_ about Wikipedia's reliability any more than they think about the reliability of their newspaper. Either they blindly think it must be true because "they" said so, and because "they" are a source other people use. Or, alternatively, perhaps they blindly think their newspaper is a cesspool of political bias and/or that Wikipedia is unreliable, not because they've looked into how their newspaper or Wikipedia work, but because someone they trust told them so. But the people who believe Wikipedia is unreliable don't use Wikipedia. The problem is with the people who do use Wikipedia. The percentage of Wikipedia users who say "That sounds odd. Let me check this History just to make sure this isn't a bit of vandalism that hasn't been fixed yet" is probably negligible. (The percentage who even know what the History tab does is probably minuscule).