World Wide Junk
In college, I was the leader of a group project for a sociology class and decided that we’ll all come up with our own research individually and then I, as the group leader, will collate the info into one coherent document. Several deadlines later, I finally get something from everyone. I was shocked at the varying quality of work I received. One student in particular gave me a copy-and-paste from a Wikipedia entry. All I had to do was Google a sentence and I found the original source. Since the project was research-based work, I asked the group members to provide citations if they had not done so already. He sent me a link to the aforementioned Wiki article.
Ethical violations and plagiarism aside, I maintain that Wikipedia gets a bad rap. Earlier versions of the site may have been flawed, but today their content actually goes through a pretty rigorous review process. Here’s an example. A friend of mine tried to post his company history and related info, and was turned down and nearly banned for spamming. Why did they turn him down when there are plenty of company pages? Wikipedia will only publish neutral and verifiable content, and as his company was relatively new with no other published sources writing about it, it was considered a personal view/original research.
Consider published work. Sure it’s not easy and a lot of work goes into it, but there’s a limited amount of editing that is done from idea to print. By a limited amount of people. Wikipedia has no limits. It is a perpetual work in progress. You don’t like it? Change it. Typo? Fix it. If your input has any merit, it will be noticed. Conversely, if your contributions are BS, you’ll be found out. This type of writing and publishing model has so much potential.
Just as you wouldn’t write a paper based on an abstract, or write a biography from one person’s recollection, Wikipedia isn’t the answer to everything. Google on the other hand. . .
My passion is to apply insights from psychology to make work and life better. On this site I gather and reflect on bits and pieces of wisdom related to business, careers, self-improvement, finances, & health. 
