Wiki article response

I completely agree with both articles regarding the validity of Wikipedia as a source for academic information. I did not hear about Wikipedia until I got to Stanford in the fall of last year, and did not really understand what it was until the fall of this year. Until this quarter, I did not know that it was an "encyclopedia" that could be edited by whomever. This fact alone made me skeptical. However, I have fallen into the "trap" of using Wikipedia as a reliable academic source. On more recent topics, there seems to be little published informaiton, simply because publishing materials is a long and arduous process. So, it is tempting to use the information in Wilipedia as fact, since there is an article concerning just about every topic out there, as well as relevant links. I was tempted to use it as a main source for my project right now, but was warned otherwise by Christine. I have, however, found it useful to utilize the links to other articles, as these can be taken more reliably as "fact." I was astonished to learn about the character defamation in the second article, that kind of thing makes me even more skeptical about the whole process. Not that this information couldn't have been put on the internet already, but the fact that it is on Wikipedia makes the "intent" of the article to be fact based. I enjoyed reading the articles, and was even inspired enough to try my own hand at article editing (although just a simple grammatical error).