If you haven't discovered Wikipedia yet

I guess Google started giving me hits on Wikipedia a year or so ago, and by fall of this year I was going to Wikipedia first for a lot of my queries. The Guardian ran a story about it in October, which I read for the first time yesterday.

Not everyone loves it, but I'm suspicious of a lot of their reasons for not liking it. "Librarian and internet consultant Philip Bradley," whomever and whatever that is, complains about "the lack of authority." Maybe that's a problem for him, but woe be unto any normal person who takes information from any single source as the absolute last word. You can find mistakes and misinformation anywhere, but when so many sources are available on the Internet, why would you ever not double check?

More annoyingly, Encyclopedia Brittanica Editor-in-chief Dale Hoiberg opines:

People write on things they're interested in, and so many subjects don't get covered; and news events get covered in great detail. The entry on Hurricane Frances is five times the length of that on Chinese art, and the entry on Coronation Street is twice as long as the article on Tony Blair.

And a big "so what?" to that. It's only a problem to people who think their customers are still making a choice between dropping multiple Madisons on a bound edition of EB versus some other hard-copy encyclopedia. Or deciding whether to pay for their ridiculous online subscription plan versus some competing service. (Are there any?)

No such either/or choices are called for. Wikipedia does what it does, a lot better than you'd think it could, and I can follow links or use Google to check facts and get other perspectives. And already other wikis and pedias are popping up to handle topics that Wikipedia doesn't cover as well.