Wikipedia is an online, collectively produced encyclopedia. Any reader of Wikipedia has the power to modify or add to an entry. (Of course, this creates the possibility of someone’s sabotaging or accidentally damaging a helpful entry.) There’s an ongoing debate in a number of places about the value of Wikipedia and its likely success over time. The next few Godwin’s Law weblog entries will outline some of my thoughts about Wikipedia, both in itself and compared to other (online and offline) resources.

The question ought not to be whether you should trust Wikipedia (for whatever value of “trust” you want to use), but why you should give your trust to traditional publications (where errors and distortions persist, when they occur, for decades and even centuries).

If you’re a critical reader, you use Wikipedia for precisely the same reasons you use other Web research tools — and other research tools generally. You use it as the *beginning* of your inquiry. If there is any evidence at all that a Wikipedia entry is necessarily *less* good for beginning an inquiry, I have yet to see it.

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