Wikipedia is excellent , if you take it with a pinch of salt.

clipped from www.guardian.co.uk Where Wikipedia works Wikipedia is an excellent venue for accessible and condensed information, if you take it with a pinch of salt. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales Perhaps you expected Encyclopedia Britannica, or one of the world's great libraries, to become the web's leading reference site. Well, Wikipedia holds that title: an amateur encyclopedia created mainly by poor writers and even worse editors. The amazing thing is how well it works. Wikipedia was started in 2001 and has almost 2 million articles in English non-English articles as well, written in about 250 different languages It's not hard to see the appeal. Wikipedia is a leading example of trendy, user-generated content. follows an open source ideal: anyone can rewrite and re-use all the content under the GNU Free Documentation License a relative of the license used for GNU/Linux. In theory, thousands of users can spot and correct errors until article approaches perfection open source software development doesn't really work like that