The truth is that we should kick our Wikipedia habit, however seductive the site is and easy to access its contents. To my mind, Wikipedia is nothing less than a monster.

Much of its content is, I have to admit, OK. But the good stuff is fatally undermined by a toxic scattering of misleading rubbish like my fake facts would be, if I went to the minimal effort of posting them.

And this junk information poisons the well of collective knowledge. It renders everything on Wikipedia suspect. At any one stage, it is estimated that there are 100,000 'sabotaged' pages on Wikipedia - which means the chances of coming across false information is one in 70.

This might not sound much, but it is enough for teachers in schools and universities to be deeply concerned about the site, telling their students not to confuse a fleeting 'click search' with actual <cite>research. </cite>Teachers try to crack down on anyone lazy enough to copy verbatim, or 'cut and paste', its frequently dubious material into their essays.

One, Professor Tara Brabazon of the University of Brighton, has explicitly banned first-year students from using Wikipedia - or Google - and insists on them sticking to reading lists.

Too many students don't use their own brains enough,' she says. 'We need to bring back the important values of research and analysis.'

Other colleges have followed suit not only here in Britain but also in America, where the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, the University of California in Los Angeles and Syracuse University in New York have all banned the use of Wikipedia as a source for material.

The truth is that Wikipedia's journey from delightful idea to cultural juggernaut to international bad joke is something of a fable for our times.

It shows how a combination of idealism and technology is falling into disrepute because of something its young progenitors forgot, or were too well-intentioned, to factor in - the sad truth that a small but substantial minority of the public are too malicious, mischievous or plain nuts to have their outpourings given a supposedly respectable platform.

The internet, heaven help us, provides a wonderful opportunity for all these kinds of people to let off steam - and there is nothing wrong with that. But surely they shouldn't be encouraged to do so on a site posing as an encyclopaedia.

So who is behind Wikipedia? How has it become so phenomenally successful since it was launched in January 2001? And can anything control the monster now that it's been unleashed?

Wikipedia's founder Jimmy Wales was an unlikely character to have started a universal work of scholarly reference. He is a one-time soft pornographer from Alabama. My source? Wikipedia, actually.

The story goes that he was awestruck as a child by his first encyclopaedia, bought for him from a travelling salesman who visited the family home in Huntsville, Alabama.

Born in 1966 to a private school teacher and a grocery store manager, he excelled at maths and made enough of a fortune as an options trader in Chicago to support himself for the rest of his life.

As the dotcom bubble inflated, he headed to Silicon Valley in California to start a company that ran what he calls a 'male interest site'. Then he alighted on the seemingly crazy idea of creating a free online encyclopaedia, written 'by the people, for the people', embarking on the venture with Larry Sanger, a website editor.

They were able to create the website thanks to a computer program called 'wiki' (a Hawaiian term meaning 'quick'). The aim was to create the biggest repository of human knowledge, all of it written and edited from scratch by absolutely anyone with time to spare.

To give the bearded Jimmy Wales his due, he soon realised that miscreants were taking over the internet asylum he so generously built them.

In the run-up to the Iraq War, constant sabotage to the pages of Tony Blair and George Bush forced him to introduce a policy that denied to anonymous users editing rights of major political figures.

That did not stop an extraordinary - and offensive - fiasco from occurring during President Obama's inauguration. After Senator Ted Kennedy left the inauguration lunch in an ambulance having had a seizure, Wikipedia stated that he had died - even though he is still alive.

And the very moment when Bruce Springsteen, Obama's superstar supporter, was launching into his song Born To Run at the Super Bowl's half-time show earlier this month, his Wikipedia entry read, simply: 'Bruce Springsteen. This guy kinda sucks.'

Later, visitors to the page were given a little more to go on: 'Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen (born, September 23, 1949), nicknamed-"The Boss" is a FAG.' Anyone who then pressed the 'refresh' button on their computer found the entire entry was translated into Japanese.

Wales has accepted that more controls have to be introduced. But can the Wikipedia monster actually <cite>be </cite>controlled now that it is so big?

The company has just 23 employees, based in Silicon Valley, so its method of minimising errors relies in the first instance on Wikipedia's readers spotting and editing inaccuracies.

Here, of course, lies the problem: there's no way of knowing whether the person who spots an error and edits an entry on any subject is a saboteur with some bizarre agenda of their own - or whether they are simply introducing innocent mistakes through ignorance.

A layer above these self-appointed Wikipedia policemen there are around 75,000 Wikipedia-approved volunteer editors around the world scrutinising the seven million pages of entries in their spare time and attempting to delete the obvious rubbish as it appears.

Using 'real' sources, from the establishment media and academic material, plus their own expert knowledge, they assess what is incorrect or unfair and remove it.

Sometimes they are remarkably quick at taking down crackpot stuff, so the entries on well-known topics, especially in science (on which they are said to be quite sound) or biographies of important personalities, are often accurate enough.

After the Ted Kennedy fiasco, Wales is proposing that editing a biography of a living person should become a two- stage process - anonymous contributors can still edit, but their amendments will have to be checked by someone higher up the Wikipedia food chain before they can be published on the internet.

But this suggestion alone has led to problems. The more crazed 'Wikipedians', as contributors are known, claim that this will amount to censorship - and the very ideal of Wikipedia, a site written by the people for the people, will be jeopardised.

'It is not in the interests of the community to trample on the views of a large and passionate minority who wish to maintain the principle that all editors have an equal right to edit and equal responsibility for what they produce,' writes one such objector.

To top all of this, Wikipedia is also in financial crisis. Wales could have made himself very rich by turning it into a traditional media company, but he refuses to accept advertising and has kept it as a charity - and the charity has recently had to pass the begging bowl.

He made a personal appeal over the internet in December to 'keep Wikipedia free', which raised $6 million (&pound;4.2 million). Some suggest this will not be enough to keep the organisation going for long.

If Wikipedia does disappear or if, as could conceivably happen, it were taken over and commercialised (and perhaps made a professional service) by someone like Bill Gates or Google, its amateurish, free-for-all days will doubtless be mourned. But at least those monstrous inaccuracies would disappear with it.

It might make for a more honest article to open with actual examples of bad stuff that's appeared on Wikipedia, as the article does eventually get to.

The company has just 23 employees, based in Silicon Valley

Despite being in the Daily Mail, and poorly written, this is a useful critique and
will likely cause Jimbo to lose some sleep tonite.

...it maintains a significant readership...

The importance of the Daily Mail is that it is the Unthinking Man's Guide to the World. It is reactionary conservative and casually serves up plausible half-truths which are accepted uncritically by a significant section of the population. It is considered the worst sort of propaganda by its detractors (me included) yet, even with the common knowledge of what it is, it maintains a significant readership. It is the sort of paper your mother reads, pausing only to comment to the world in general "It's true you know" as she skims the stories.

This is getting to the general uninterested population - the sort of people we would never reach. It is a fairly predictable publishing cycle - build up to knock down. The only trick they missed was the way Wikipedia published information about the Royal Family and the identity of the blackmail victim which was unlawful in the UK (cleaned up somewhat now), which would have outraged the staunchly Royalist readership.

Whilst the Guardian can be a bit too airy-fairy and is far from perfect as a news source, it's a much better paper overall than the Daily Mail.

1. An anthropologist could tell you that your postmodern middle England is schizophrenic when it comes to these things.

2. Throughout the non-Western world, and indeed in the past in the Western world, it is/was the norm for young people, probably not as young as 13, but young people, teenagers and twentysomethings, to be having children.

3. That's more biologically normal than putting fortysomething women through IVF treatment or whatever fucked up shit they do because they feel a 'career' is more important.

4. This notion that everyone has to have a 'career' is a destructive way of thinking and is not universalisable.

5. You need a large proportion of the population, especially men, to work in hard industry, you idiots, like used to happen in the UK.

6. Unfortunately, that ain't really happening much at all anymore,

7. Hence the rise in the sorts of deviant activity that these paranoid fucks at the Daily Mail get so wound up about.

The importance of the Daily Mail is that it is the Unthinking Man's Guide to the World. It is reactionary conservative and casually serves up plausible half-truths which are accepted uncritically by a significant section of the population.

The ultimate British unthinking man, Alan Partridge, has described the Daily Mail as "arguably the best newspaper in the world". Back of the net!

(Note: in the fictional world of Alan Partridge, this was not a documentary, but actually a "post-documentary". In the commentary on the DVD, Alan explains that all the events depicted in the series actually occurred, but everyone in the show, apart from himself and his personal assistant Lynn Benfield (played by Felicity Montagu who went on to play a vicar's wife in Nighty Night (2004)), were actors hired to portray the events in the Linton Travel Tavern "after they had actually occurred".)

That was quite a good article, at least the first sections, after that you got the impression it was never going to end.

I imagine myself trapped on the next seat of a plane with the author of this article, long-haul to Tokyo or somewhere. So many things to learn ...

I suspect that Partridge himself has been socking on his own article. Come to think of it, I'm positive I've seen his interference on just about every single Wiki article I've ever read. Not bad, considering he's (probably) a fictional character.

...as could conceivably happen, it were taken over and commercialised (and perhaps made a professional service) by someone like Bill Gates or Google...

.. Larry Sanger, a website editor

example Mail BLP pots and kettles. and the recent sustained bigotry over gay adoption....no The Mail doesn't come to this issue with clean hands. not at all.

Probably???
You are one funny, funny guy. Slap yourself in the face for me.

See them little words under the headline, after the word "By"? That's the name of the person that can be sued. Even if its fake, the company that publishes can be sued too.

Any random berk cannot change the article. Someone is taking responsibility for its contents.

Do you understand the difference?

.. The practice of libel tourism as it is known—the willingness of British courts to allow wealthy foreigners who do not live here to attack publications that have no connection with Britain—is now an international scandal. It shames Britain and makes a mockery of the idea that Britain is a protector of core democratic freedoms. Libel tourism sounds innocuous, but underneath the banal phrase is a major assault on freedom of information, which in today’s complex world is more necessary than ever if evil, such as the jihad ideology that led to the Mumbai massacres, is not to flourish, and if those who traffic arms, blood diamonds, drugs and money to support Islamist extremist organisations that hide behind charitable status are not to be exposed...I put it to the House that it is unbelievable that the state legislatures of New York and Illinois, and Congress itself, are having to pass Bills to stop British courts seeking to fine and punish American journalists and writers for publishing books and articles that may be freely read in the United States but which a British judge has decided are offensive to wealthy foreigners who can hire lawyers in Britain to persuade a British court to become a new Soviet-style organ of censorship against freedom of expression.

Denis MacShane MP said:-