Truth or truthyness?

The other day I saw a rather interesting documentary about Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia on the internet. It seems like no matter what you're looking for, your search engine will always come up with some Wikipedia pages as part of your search results. “Great!” You'll think, stop the search, there is this bulk of information just around the corner. Unfortunately you can wonder whether this is really true. Sure, Wikipedia holds millions of pages about thousands of subjects. Ten thousands of people discussed these subjects, but, does this mean you can rely on Wikipedia? Does the huge amount of writers, editors and opinions really make the content more reliable?

The two founders of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, struggled with the same question. Jimmy Wales is still a strong believer of free editorship and uncensored contribution. Wikipedia to him is as valuable as for instance the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Larry Sanger however left Wikipedia, since he couldn't let the public decide what his online encyclopedia should contain. From his point of view Wikipedia can only be reliable as long as professional editors moderate every single bit of content.

The question probably is whether the truth of the expert can compete with the truthyness of the 14 year old kid altering some content on the internet. I guess In the end we are responsible ourselves, and checking facts should probably be done by comparing multiple sources, just like in the old days.