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Wikipedia != Authoritative?
Frozen North writes "Recently, this article in the Syracuse Post-Standard caused a stir by dismissing Wikipedia as an authoritative source, and even suggesting that it was a little deceptive by looking too much like a "real" encyclopedia. Techdirt suggested an experiment: insert bogus information into Wikipedia, and see how long it takes for the mistake to be removed. Well, I did that experiment, and the results weren't good: five errors inserted over five days, all of which lasted until I removed them myself at the end of the experiment."
If you'll grant that there are more honest people than asshats in the world, then over long periods of time, the wiki will tend towards authoritativeness as intentional errors are weeded out. The majority of edits will be valuable.
Or perhaps you're more pessimistic than I am, with regard to human nature.
Visit the Game Programming Wiki!
Your arguing a point that the article doesn't address. His point isn't "look, I can get mistakes into wikipedia, so wikipedia is stupid!" His point is that you can't treat the wikipedia as an authoritative source, because it's far too easy to insert the mistakes. The amount of funding that wikipedia gets, how "boring" the topics are, and how long he left them up are all completely irrelevant. Either a source can be trusted, or it can't -- and wikipedia cannot.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Actually in scientific papers there can be malicious mistakes too. If you read this Wikipedia article on Peer Review you would see that peer review can only be used to correct small mistakes, but can't actually detect outright fraud. This is why there have been so many completely falsified scientific papers that weren't found out until years later even though they were peer reviewed. In many cases wikipedia articles have more accuracy than scientific papers because of their policy of "no original research", whereby if someone posts a fact you aren't sure about then all you have to do is google it. However in a scientific paper this doesn't work because you would actually have to duplicate the experiment yourself, which many times isn't feasible.
Using that logic, very little on the web can ever be trusted.
Hackers often change websites, accounts get hacked (Gabe Newell?), people lie in posts all the time, whole websites can be designed to mislead you...
But this shows one important thing: you don't have to be able to trust a source for it to be useful. I don't trust most of the web, but if I do research and 15 websites agree on a fact, even though I don't trust each individual website, I can trust the consensus of 15 independent websites.
This phenomenon is present in Wikipedia because there are so many folks contributing. The liklihood is that errors will be corrected over time, and that even though you cannot trust it as infalliable, it proves to be an extremely useful tool. Further, it at least has a policy on accuracy and NPOV, whereas most other internet-based sources do not, or at least do not publish one publicly.
Theists always say this and it is complete and utter tripe. It's in the basic definition: atheism. It's not a belief in 0 gods, it is a lack of belief in gods. Theists have a great difficulty in understanding the difference.
You can't accept that people don't have this belief, so try and make the lack of it a belief in itself which is absurd.
You don't need a belief system to not believe in something. Otherwise you'd need a special religion for each non-existant thing, i.e. the non-tooth fairy believers religion, the non-santa claus believers religion.
Just because lots of theists find it difficult to wrap their heads around the concept of not needing to believe in anything, they find a need to fit everything into a neat little belief box. As though they're embarrassed about having a belief system while an atheist doesn't.