The format is fine. The content sometimes needs to be tweaked.

 

I'm not gonna lie, I enjoy searching for stuff on Wikipedia. I look up something relatively simple - something that should take about 30 seconds to read about. Then I click about three hyperlinks and wind up reading about Ayers Rock, Dark Matter, MLB statistics, the Falklands War, random strange and interesting stuff... It's like six degrees of separation but with everything ever.

...using google!

 

If you did, folks like Nanny wouldn't be able to offer Wikipedia information as documentation!

Hahaha. To me, the *format* is what is the best part about it. The information is basic - still lacking in areas, yes. People need to think of it like expanded Cliffs Notes outlines or something - sort of like gateways into or elementary primers on a subject.

 

Put it this way... I could google quantum mechanics. I could also wikipedia quantum mechanics, and then click on about 25 other entries that I wind up exploring further. On the actual main entry, where every word that isn't a common word - every proper noun, technical term, etc - is another hyperlink? I wind up clicking on them all, with 50 tabs open in Firefox, reading every single other page. Force of habit.

 

It's an encyclopedia. An open source Microsoft Encarta. Of course there's no way should people cite it. And I could care less how college kids want to waste their money or get kicked out for plagurism. But for me, it takes me 10 seconds to remember / learn a technical term or something.

 

Plus, it's sort of a work in progress... I could literally spend a month picking out all their political slants and "disputing the neutrality" of some of the crap I read on there, absolutely. On that, they are an absolute mess.

 

Hopefully it'll get sorted out. The site could be something pretty big.

 

Wikipedia is OK for hard science, but be VERY CAREFUL of anything in it with a political dimension.  Some of the editors have sys-op type privileges and can lock articles so that they cannot be changed, or set up subroutines to remove your edits faster than you can submit them.  At least several of them have political agendas.

 

The article that bothers me the most is the one on the California energy crisis.  Originally it had a detailed timeline and accurate step by step analysis.  The current version just blames Enron.