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Prosecutor Loses Case For Citing Wikipedia
Hugh Pickens writes "The Philippine Daily Inquirer reports on a recent case where the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG) lost an appeal after seeking to impeach the testimony of a defendant's expert witness by citing an article from Wikipedia. In her brief, the defendant said 'the authority, alluded to by oppositor-appellant, the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders DSM-IV-TR," was taken from an Internet website commonly known as Wikipedia,' and argued that Wikipedia itself contains a disclaimer saying it 'makes no guarantee of validity.' The court in finding for the defendant said in its decision that it found 'incredible ... if not a haphazard attempt, on the part of the (OSG) to impeach an expert witness, with, as pointed out by (the defendant) unreliable information. This is certainly unacceptable evidence, nothing short of a mere allegation totally unsupported by authority.'"
This seems to me to be a bit overstretching the "truth" about Wikipedia and smacks of a little trollness aimed at it. I don't advocate citing it in cases of real-world serious business such as law or education, but for every day research about general knowledge it's relatively "truthful" enough to be of good use. You're basically claiming that because it's "crowdsourced" it must be useless rubbish. Certainly there is plenty of mass stupidity out there trying to pose as truth, but an informed researcher will be able to sniff out the garbage in the information they are looking for and a really smart researcher will use more than one source to try to confirm and cross-reference each one to get a consensus of "truth" from multiple sources. I like Wikipedia for general non-life or death use.