[WikiEN-l] Reverberating self-reinforcing autoregenerative circular sourcing

[Steve Summit]

dpbsmith wrote:
> Good, right? Unfortunately the reporter did not cite his source.
> So someone contacted that reporter and asked. 
>
> And, guess what: the reporter's source was the Wikipedia article.

Yowza.  Just like the apocryphal small town where the City Hall
manager set the town hall's clock based on the factory whistle,
and unbeknownst to him the factory superintendent...

On the one hand I'm tempted to wring my hands and say, *how*
can we better get across to responsible people (like presumably
newspaper editors) the well-known fact that Wikipedia is not
necessarily reliable and can't be relied on as a sole source?

But on the other hand, Wikipedia is now "good enough" that this
kind of thing is absolutely inevitable.  (I'm a responsible
person, and I'm pretty sure *I* take Wikipedia articles at
face value more often than I strictly ought to.)

It's like consumer-grade GPS receivers: everybody knows they're
not 100% accurate; the manufacturers all include various
disclaimers, but they work so magically well, most of the time,
that it's all but inevitable that, say, a sailor somewhere is
going to try to rely on his GPS receiver to navigate a narrow
channel in the fog, where the width of the channel is down on
a par with the GPS uncertainty radius...

(Apologies for the rambling.  No, I don't know what the right
answer is.)