I thought of this thread recently as i noticed the continuing deterioration of information at Wikipedia. Part of it is politicization, in that people are altering articles to bring them into line with their belief sets. A good example of this is the vandalization of articles about Jesus and the early church which began about two years ago now. It is also showing up in a raft of other articles which have a political bent. The wiki process means that someone can drastically alter an article, and putting it to rights involves months of tortured discussion--there is no overarching, larger and authoritative editorial process or body. I noticed it recently because there is a military history group now at Wikipedia, and while perusing articles on the Hundred Years war to get the names of contemporary sources, i saw tha this group has been editing articles on the topic, an are frequently completely wrong. What arlarmed me most is that they were not only not citing sources, but were even flatly contradicting contemporary sources which they had quoted in the article--and it appears that they are peddling completely unreliable stuff they saw in television programs.
