My old friend Delirium wrote: The difference is, of course, that when you and I contribute to Wikipedia, we have the ambition to create something more lasting, more reliable than a bunch of Usenet postings. It is still unclear exactly what level of reliability we should expect out of Wikipedia. It is probably lower than what people used to expect of printed encyclopedias in previous centuries, but it should be higher than most arguments thrown around in discussion forums. On its front page, Wikipedia has the ambition to *be* a free encyclopedia, and that might set expectations just a little higher than can be achieved. To the core community the emphasis is on "free," but many outside readers seem to focus on "encyclopedia." This over-expectation is evident from Seigenthaler's piece, where he writes: : Wales, in a recent C-Span interview with Brian Lamb, insisted : that his website is accountable and that his community of : thousands of volunteer editors (he said he has only one paid : employee) corrects mistakes within minutes. I don't know what Jimbo might have said in that interview, but apparently Seigenthaler took it to be some kind of guarantee that every mistake will be corrected within minutes. I doubt that Jimbo would ever promise anything like that. The ethical part is that Seigenthaler's biography was not only incorrect but also contained rather serious allegations. We should probably be more careful to check facts when a person is called a criminal. Many other errors can be less important. Instead of a general requirement on sourcing every fact, I think it would make sense to require sources to such allegations. -- Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se