A Wikipedia já foi muito ruim - o que era compreensível quando o negócio começou. Atualmente, encontra-se bastante coisa boa escrita em língua inglesa (em português, só se for de Portugal, e assim mesmo não há tanta oferta). Mesmo assim, não dá para usar como fonte. No máximo, se não achar uma informação em qualquer outro lugar, algo bastante improvável, serve para buscar as citações do artigo e recorrer às fontes originais. Bom, essa peroração é para sugerir a leitura do artigo escrito por Nicholson Baker para o The New York Review of Books:

The Charms of Wikipedia

By Nicholson Baker

Wikipedia: The Missing Manual
by John Broughton
Pogue Press/O’Reilly 477 pp., $29.99 (paper)

Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It’s fact-encirclingly huge, and it’s idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking, and full of simmering controversies—and it’s free, and it’s fast. In a few seconds you can look up, for instance, “Diogenes of Sinope,” or “turnip,” or “Crazy Eddie,” or “Bagoas,” or “quadratic formula,” or “Bristol Beaufighter,” or “squeegee,” or “Sanford B. Dole,” and you’ll have knowledge you didn’t have before. It’s like some vast aerial city with people walking briskly to and fro on catwalks, carrying picnic baskets full of nutritious snacks.

More people use Wikipedia than Amazon or eBay—in fact it’s up there in the top-ten Alexa rankings with those moneyed funhouses MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube. Why? Because it has 2.2 million articles, and because it’s very often the first hit in a Google search, and because it just feels good to find something there—even, or especially, when the article you find is maybe a little clumsily written. Any inelegance, or typo, or relic of vandalism reminds you that this gigantic encyclopedia isn’t a commercial product. There are no banners for E*Trade or Classmates.com, no side sprinklings of AdSense.

It was constructed, in less than eight years, by strangers who disagreed about all kinds of things but who were drawn to a shared, not-for-profit purpose. They were drawn because for a work of reference Wikipedia seemed unusually humble. It asked for help, and when it did, it used a particularly affecting word: “stub.” At the bottom of a short article about something, it would say, “This article about X is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.” And you’d think: That poor sad stub: I will help. Not right now, because I’m writing a book, but someday, yes, I will try to help.