I have to say that I’m very disappointed in the Times’ article on Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales. The biggest fail is the headline. It reads “Jimmy Wales Is Not an Internet Billionaire,” but then never addresses how much money he actually makes from Wikipedia. Insane.
I guess the problem with this article is that it is a profile of the founder. The guy sounds like a bit of a dick, really. I didn’t really need to know about him.
I am, on the other hand, massively interested in Wikipedia. I remember when it was the punchline of an academic joke. Now, professors use it as much as anyone to look up the name of the ambassor to Pakistan, the birthday of Hulk Hogan, and Queen Elizabeth’s second cousin. It’s one of the few places on the web, where the democratic promise still lives. God, I could gush for hours about the wonders of wikipedia.
Apt. 11d 
Wikipedia is surprisingly undemocratic. When I was working at a university in California, I found that an unnamed editor had removed an entire section on our college, saying it was copied from the web page. I registered and tried to re-do it and they kept deleting it. Eventually the info was added again but I had no idea who did it. Same thing when I tried to correct an factual error about one of our faculty members, which I could document. Every time I corrected it, the editor deleted it until we had a complicated exchange and I convinced him it was ok. T(The only was to contact them is via a difficult comment process.) One of out communication students did a research project on wikipedia, expecting it to be democratic and open, and found quite the opposite. She said it was closed little world where people who had the power – the editors – did not want to share it. And I believe most of the editors are men. It is a great source for quick info, but don’t have any illusions about its democratic promise.
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I find Wikipedia really reliable for stuff like pop culture or book summaries, but there are odd gaps in their coverage, often driven by the narrow demographics of their editors. Some years ago, I looked up Vicki Iovine (the author of the very popular Girlfriends’ Guides), only to find out that she was only covered as a former Playboy Miss something-or-other (that has since been fixed). Kathy Shaidle recently pointed out that Wikipedia has no article on the nuclear freeze movement, which was huge in the 1980s. I just checked, and there truly does not seem to be a stand alone article, although the phrase “nuclear freeze movement” does appear in various places. However, choose any random Simpsons character or TV show, and there will be exhaustive detail.
More seriously, some of the commentors at skepticalob.com (the anti-homebirth internet hangout) have mentioned that Wikipedia often lets woo run amuck in their articles related to childbirth, probably because the nerdy single guys who run it don’t know nothing about birthing babies, so they let various iffy statements stand unchallenged.
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I was just skimming Wikipedia’s article on home birth. I didn’t have time to read the whole thing in detail, but the bibliography section was grossly lopsided. They have one item in the section on “Material against home birth” (namely a statement from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists) and then literally a dozen items in the section on “Material supporting home birth.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homebirth
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