You write: “Scepticism is even built in to the process – noone treats wikipedia as objectively true, unlike some traditional encyclopedias. Errors actually get rectified, within the hour even.”

I think the opposite is true. More and more resources are now citing Wiki as an “authority” and while obvious errors on popular pages will get corrected quickly, most don’t. How many errors have you corrected??

Wiki is very good at producing information which is “common knowledge” but it also suffers from that as a problem. Where there is a “common misconception,” Wikipedia is liable to re-inforce the misconception.

Add into this the edit system and there is a good chance that the page you look at today will be radically different tomorrow (check out some of the more popular science ones for an example).

At the extreme, a student could easily edit a wiki article to say what ever they want it to say and then cite themselves. Not exactly “good education” 🙂

Wiki is good where its articles show references. Where it doesnt, well, you get what you pay for sometimes.