wikipedia and authenticity

Wikipedia continues to amaze me, especially the debate around the 'authenticity' of it's content. I've aggregated a series of articles that I've found that discuss the topic.

This wired article is an interesting description of wikipedia contributors and how they contribute and 'own' content areas. Wikipedia'’s premise is that a crowd of interested and diverse people will produce better content than a small group of experts. Some interesting quotes from the article include

"“Wikipedia offers 500,000 articles in English - compared with Britannica's 80,000 and Encarta's 4,500 - fashioned by more than 16,000 contributors."

After reading those statistics people wonder wikipedia handles slander or sloppy content and this quote tries to answer that.

"When MIT's Fernanda Vargas and IBM's Martin Wattenberg and Kushal Dave studied Wikipedia, they found that cases of mass deletions, a common form of vandalism, were corrected in a median time of 2.8 minutes. When an obscenity accompanied the mass deletion, the median time dropped to 1.7 minutes."

Of course, a series of folks have already aggregated this information and created a topic page on wikipedia covering the wikipedia peer review and authenticity topic.This wikipedia page provides links to the nature magazine article as well as lots of other third party peer reviews of wikipedia and Britannica.

This is the original article that compares Wikipedia and Britannica, followed by Nature responded and on and on:). The BBC also published a series of articles on the topic.