How authoritative is Wikipedia?

According to an item on Slashdot, which in turn referenced an article in the Syracse Post-Standard (which I haven't read yet) that apparently dismissed the notion that Wikipedia be considered an authoritative source and suggested that Wikipedia "was a little deceptive by looking too much like a 'real' encyclopedia," an attempt to see how long it took for mistakes to be removed from articles came up pretty short.

I commented on the post (as an AnonymousCoward, since I left my /. password at home) as follows:

The tester introduced five subtle errors over five days in a database with over a million entries and because they weren't corrected in time periods of between 20 hours and five days, concludes "it would be very easy for subtle mistakes to sneak into Wikipedia, and go a very long time without being corrected." Wow.

A more accurate test, it would seem to me, would be to take articles of varying importance and, in fact, check the facts. (While you're at it, do the same for analogous articles in, say, Britannica.) The one problem with this is that checking facts is a very intense process, if you're serious about it.

Without having gone through this process, it would appear hard to say whether traditional publishers are any better at it than the volunteers who contribute to Wikipedia, except that over the past few years, I've grown to be as skeptical of traditional "authoritative" sources as I am of the morning newsprint.

I've worked in the publishing industry, and in my opinion, a number of publishers considered "authoritative" are living off the inertia of a time when sharp, intelligent people were cheap to hire, and one could afford to have encyclopedias checked by "armies" of worker bees.

I don't know why, but I think this is an issue worth pursuing. What does it mean for a source to be authoritative? Do any encyclopedias fall into this category? (Do any newspapers?) Who knows, it may be relevant to my Wiki presentation in Toronto in October?

In DVD news, Galina and I watched something called Tango last night, which seemed to be a series of dance routines thinly coated with somthing that tried real hard to be a plot. I fell asleep in the middle of it. We also watched The Big Bounce, which caused me to recall the old saw that runs "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me." With the exception of his appearance in Behind Enemy Lines, Owen Wilson's acting appears strictly one-dimensional (sort of like Hugh Grant's: same fella, different movie).

This evening, we watched a pair of French films rented from Hollywood Video. I only today noticed that the foreign film section in the store extends nearly along an entire side of an aisle (instead of the more traditional rack-and-a-half). The good news is that the films are exercising my language; the bad news is I don't really enjoy them.

I pretty much stayed away from the screen today. Tomorrow, I shall have to sit down and take care of a pair of documents for Tuesday.

Cheers...