It has become ridiculous, however. Wikipedia now measures the qualities of its entries by the number of references, which can easily number by hundreds if it is a bit lengthy. The result is: Nobody reads the references (as with any academic work, nobody reads the footnotes), thus you can write any crap and include a phony reference. Or even worse, you can write that, for instance, continental drift is an unproven scientific theory, since there are websites that claim this.
My beef with Wikipedia is that there is a reason why conventional encyclopaedias and reference works are written by scientists and scholars. I agree that these should be free and readily avaliable, if there would be some alternative way of funding and sponsorship- but the way Wikipedia is going isn't really the right one, because idealism and good intentions don't assure quality. Sure, there are some brilliant articles by expert authors in Wikipedia, but quality is usually assured by peer reviews, which means anybody can criticise anything, even if that means leaning up against reasoned and working conventions. Most peer reviews rather criticise the way an entry is written (which, of course, is important as well for a popular reference work), but can't do any proper reviewing on the content. Including references is an attempt at overcoming this limitation, but more often than not, you simply see a tag reading "citation needed" than anything else; and if you include a footnote to a piece of print media, be it books, newspaper articles, magazines, or whatever- nobody will check it anymore. So many people want to see internet references, which is hardly the way to go. If everything that is said in Wikipedia is veryfied by something that is looked up on the internet, then why do we need Wikipedia at all? Moreso, since most Websites are not anonymous, like Wikipedia articles, but written by experts on the subject who stand by it with their name, and usually even offering an overview over their qualifications, as is required by the authors of scientific and academic publications. If I wrote something in Wikipedia s "ThePerun666", nobody knows who it comes from or what my qualifications are, as I can choose not to write about it. However, if I earned myself a reputation with well-worded and seemingly accurate -because referenced- articles and seemingly intelligent participation in discussions, most people will believe anything I write, no matter if it's manure, crap or shit. If you don't believe me, I would be happy to prove it.
A professor of mine wrote in a book on history on the internet that he once published a paper on the Black Plague, which he later put on a website for some of his colleagues to see; using all necessary formalities, like long and accurate footnotes and an extensive bibliography. He later found this paper cited on many other, even academic, websites as one of the best and most reliable available articles on the Black Plague; the only problem was that it was originally a hoax article, and every single word written in it was made up. One of the footnotes even read "J. Lennon, P. McCartney: Nowhere Man. London 1843" (I did something similar in a paper on Canada in WWI, reading "A. Smith, S. Harris: Paschendale. London 2003", trying to test how much my lecturer actually goes in depth checking my literature, and he didn't notice the nature of this 'publication'). But because the article was full of references, footnotes, Latin quotes and whatnot, nobody bothered to check the verity of it all- since the author was a habilitated professor, they just chose to believe it.
. The truth is, Wiki is getting better every day. 