Recently, we’ve run stories about scholars complaining that Wikipedia’s highly motivated ignoramuses trash their work (here and here, for example), and it’s no surprise that factual information about ID theory is dead in the water. More recently, author Philip Roth notes in “An Open Letter to Wikipedia” (New Yorker, September 7, 2012),
I am Philip Roth. I had reason recently to read for the first time the Wikipedia entry discussing my novel “The Human Stain.” The entry contains a serious misstatement that I would like to ask to have removed. This item entered Wikipedia not from the world of truthfulness but from the babble of literary gossip—there is no truth in it at all.
Yet when, through an official interlocutor, I recently petitioned Wikipedia to delete this misstatement, along with two others, my interlocutor was told by the “English Wikipedia Administrator”—in a letter dated August 25th and addressed to my interlocutor—that I, Roth, was not a credible source: “I understand your point that the author is the greatest authority on their own work,” writes the Wikipedia Administrator—“but we require secondary sources.” More.
Just another reason why the News desk here rarely or never uses Wikipedia as a source.
If we need Orwellian info, we can just read Nineteen Eighty Four.
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