Re:Because of the Internet, everyone's an expert.. (Score 2, Interesting)

Wikipedia is indeed patchy, but I wouldn't tar all of its technical content with the same brush. Certain fields are represented very well, e.g. mathematics. There are in some fields quite a solid core of people that watch edits on anything in certain categories and look at the changes, effectively performing peer review. Of course, things slip through, but if you look at the profiles of these people many of them are university professors, researchers, and so on. I think mathematics on wikipedia is possibly a bit of a special case though, since definitions are necessarily extremely precise, far more so than in other fields. This does, at least in part, ensure that a lot of the people who contribute have the kind of mindset needed to be editors. (Before a load of people flame me about how this applies in physics, computer science etc, my only reason for not using those as a reference is that as a mathematician myself, I thought I'd talk about what I know.)

Wikipedia is also often the *only* place you will find a page explaining what something actually is, first time. Search engines almost never achieve that.