obligatory humorous link to an article on.
Meanwhile, Wikipedia has some serious credibility problems, as a federal judge in California recently observed:
“It is unfortunate that the parties were unable to provide more authoritative evidence. One court recently noted the danger of relying
on Wikipedia:
Wikipedia.com [is] 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do not cite their sources, something that makes it hard for the reader to judge the credibility of what is written;’ and (v) ‘many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.’ ” Campbell ex rel.
Campbell v. Secretary of Health and Human Services, 69 Fed.Cl. 775, 781 (2006).
“See also Badasa v. Mukasey, 540 F.3d 909, 910 (8th Cir.2008) (noting that Wikipedia is not a sufficiently reliable source on
which to rest judicial findings for the reasons stated in Campbell); Kole v. Astrue, No. CV 08–0411–LMB, 2010 WL 1338092,
*7 n. 3 (D.Idaho Mar. 31, 2010) (“At this point, it must be noted that, in support of his brief, Respondent cites to Wikipedia.
While it may support his contention of what the mathematical symbols of ‘’ refer to, Respondent is admonished from
using Wikipedia as an authority in this District again. Wikipedia is not a reliable source at this level of discourse. As an attorney
representing the United States, Mr. Rodriguez should know that citations to such unreliable sources only serve to undermine his
reliability as counsel”); R. Jason Richards, Courting Wikipedia, 44 TRIAL 62, 62 (2008) (“Since when did a Web site that any
Internet surfer can edit become an authoritative source by which law students could write passing papers, experts could provide
credible testimony, lawyers could craft legal arguments, and judges could issue precedents?”); James Glerick, Wikipedians Leave
Cyberspace, Meet in Egypt, WALL ST. J., Aug. 8, 2008, at W1 (“Anyone can edit [a Wikipedia] article, anonymously, hit and
run. From the very beginning that has been Wikipedia's greatest strength and its greatest weakness”).” Crispin v. Christian Audigier, Inc., 717 F.Supp.2d 965, 976 (C.D. Cal., 2010).
Definitely not 'scholarly mature.'
