The weak link on Slashdot is the writing. I opened this article link mainly because after reading Lantrix's summary twice, I could not understand for the life of me what had happened. Thank you, 26199 for giving a one-sentence summary which actually made sense, unlike slashdot's FPP. With only a couple of hundred new words per day on the front page, couldn't Slashdot hire an editor to rewrite the summaries to make them understandable?
I agree that the journalist is a fool for writing an article using a Wikipedia article as his source. I am a big fan of Wikipedia but it is this kind of thing which makes me think there must have been something seriously wrong with that study which said that wiki was as accurate as Britannica. I am betting their sample size was too small, and they just happened to miss the fairly high percentage of Wiki articles that contain wild inaccuracies; I notice them all the time in my particular field.
In addition to the journalistic world, I think Wiki research is becoming a problem in academia as well: first-and-second-year students doing their 'research' by reading and recycling wikipedia articles on the topic, and little else. The Britannica was probably used for 'research' like this back in the day, but it had a much smaller range of articles, whereas Wiki has articles on practically everything, making bad-faith research efforts by younger students proportionally easier.
Finally, for those who suggest this isn't a 'big deal', think about what this says about the new and supposedly accuracy-enhancing Wikipedia footnoting fetish. I've thought about this myself with Wiki articles I have worked on. It so happens that a good number of my edits have drawn on out-of-print and banned books published in Arabic by obscure publishing houses in Egypt. I have duly footnoted passages and quotes, but how many Wiki readers are ever going to be able to check on my sources? By citing these sources (and there really were no other options), I have in some sense armored my edits against any challenges, since I am footnoting, but with things that can't really be checked.
