Ethan Zuckerman:

For many years, teachers warned their students not to cite Wikipedia—the information found there didn’t come from institutional authorities, but could be written by anyone. In other words, it might be misinformation. But something odd has happened in the past decade: Wikipedia’s method of debating its way to consensus, allowing those with different perspectives to add and delete each other’s text until a “neutral point of view” is achieved, has proved surprisingly durable. […] In the past decade, we’ve moved from Wikipedia being the butt of online jokes about unreliability to Wikipedia being one of the best definitions we currently have of consensus reality.