All knowledge is contained on Wikipedia. Possibly

Wikipedia is both an incredibly useful resource, and the absolute bane of a teacher/information professional's life. It's become ubiquitous as a source of all knowledge, and a recent spat with the Encyclopedia Britannica didn't settle the matter, it only added fuel to the fire.

I use Wikipedia all the time to look up TV shows and people I've never heard of, as well as finding a good source of references. A good Wiki article is an absolute mine of information, as long as you're willing to scroll down to the bottom of the page and check where the information came from. If there's nothing there, then you have to take the information in the article with a pinch of salt.

Personally, I tend to find that the factual information in Wikipedia is normally pretty accurate. It's the interpretation I find a little suspect. So the science pages are actually pretty good (or so my chemist husband tells me) because they're pretty much copied out of a book. But historical or political pages are much more vulnerable to bias - famously, the George W Bush page has to be locked down to avoid one side or the other putting their own spin on the events of his Presidency.

I took a trip over to the web 2.0 wiki and added a few lines about the wiki we're using at the Law Library for managing our reclassification project - since the wiki isn't live yet, there's not too much to say, and I expect Helen (who's done more work on it than I have) will add more when she gets to this "Thing". I also had an interesting time glancing through notes about various Web 2.0 around Oxford and particularly the thought that has gone into how they're used. We use so many at the Law Library, that I'm not actually sure we need any more, but I like to see why libraries have chosen what they've chosen. Because in the end, all these things are just tools for doing the job, and each library will need different things from them.

And since I seem unable to disentangle Things 17 and 18, I've put more thoughts about Wikipedia under the jump below