Rick wrote:
An accusation of lack of reliability -- http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2004/07/12/one_great_sour...
Jimbo is being a little too modest when he says that scholars haven't picked articles for fact-checking - we have a number of scholars and other authorities who are WPers, the articles in their areas get pretty thoroughly fact-checked, and they watch those articles closely to see that new errors don't get in. The only thing that hasn't happened yet is a large-scale systematic review.
As a future response to news queries, I suggest "de-personalizing" a bit; Wikipedia's authority should rest on the published body of knowledge, not individual expertise. Part of how we're able to leverage non-experts is that if an article references an authoritative source, anybody can compare the two. I have no personal experience of aircraft carriers, but I can make sure a launching date matches what the Royal Navy says it is.
Conversely, if random Nobelists were to get on WP and add unpublished bits, I would expect those to get smacked down as quickly as the latest crackpot ranting. It's also a feature that we're not held hostage to (almost-)dead-white-guy viewpoints, which as we know sometimes lack, uh, "neutrality". :-)
The Britannica guy should read a little more Linux history, so he doesn't embarass himself by saying exactly the same things that Microsoft said about Linux years ago. Hundreds of professional programmers were working on GNU and Linux as part of their day jobs while most of the world still thought it was a "hobby operating system" - we didn't advertise it so much at the time, so as avoid getting squashed by MS while we were still vulnerable.
Stan