Wikipedia. Simultaneously the font of all human knowledge and ignorance. If I need to know the name of all the Transformers that’s where I go. If I need to know what fusion is, I’ll go elsewhere.
That is a bit harsh but it’s based on personal experience. Once I was reading about the Angel of Death (Josef Mengele) and it had a ‘quote’ from Hitler about how good Mengele was, how kind and caring, how he, Hitler, could not be as great with the Doctor, etc, etc. All total nonsense from revisionists but it was included as a real quote and if you didn’t know better you may think that the two were in regular communication so you’d start to have a different opinion of history than was true.
Which is where the danger lies as well as in uninformed people making statements, dodgy facts, political opinions masquerading as fact, etc.
But, to be fair, things really have moved on since then in a good way. Footnotes to actual sources are more numerous and of higher quality, editing is tighter, pages are locked and so forth. While I would not use Wikipedia as my source in my Important Works, I would perhaps use it as a jumping off point for some broad data and then go into the footnotes and references.
I don’t have much experience of other wiki based witchcraft but have been looking into some recently, so we’ll see what comes out of that.
Now that this is added to the UK Library Blogs site I expect a book deal in no time from the increased readership.
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