It bears repeating: ANYone can publish anything they want to a worldwide audience on the Web, whether what they publish is good or bad.

Wikipedia is an ambitious group effort by people all over the world to create an interactive encyclopedia in which anyone can contribute, edit, and update the information on its server.

Who decides the content of each Wikipedia article?

The Related Link above is a fascinating short Flash video that uses time-lapsed video editing to demonstrate how a single Wikipedia entry was edited over several months. Narrator Jon Udell shows just how easily Wikipedia can be edited and updated by many different people. He shows how factual and typographical errors are created, destroyed, or edited by others...but who are these others, and what qualifies them to make the changes?

The second related link is a scholarly journal article that appeared in First Monday, a peer-reviewed journal on the Internet.

The British Broadcasting Company (BBC) recently reported that Wikipedia Scanner, a tool that tracks Wikipedia edits to the addresses that did them, discovered that:

• the United States' Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has made edits to the Wikipedia page about the president of Iran;
• the Vatican edited the Wikipedia biography of Sinn Fein (Ireland) Gerry Adams;
• a computer owned by the U.S. Democratic Party was used to change right-wing talk-show host Rush Limbaugh's entry, labeling him as "idiotic," "racist," and a "bigot," and his audience as "most of them are legally retarded."

"Wikipedia is one of the Internet's most popular fact-checking sites. But a new tool shows how the online encyclopedia, which is maintained by its users, is often manipulated by the companies and individuals who are the subjects of its entries" (summary taken from the National Public Radio Web site).

Hear the National Public Radio report (runtime: 5 minutes) on the Wikipedia Scanner program created by Virgil Griffith, a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology.

Lastly, Wikipedia Scanner logged over 2,800 entries to Wikipedia that were traced to computers in Hawai'i. Read the full story in the Honolulu Advertiser article above.

The bottom line on Wikipedia? For many purposes, it's okay. But if you really really REALLY want to be sure about something, cross-check it with a reliable source, such as a reference book in the library, a journal article, or some other reputable source.

Librarians can help you with this.